Hello, everyone. Did you know we have customizable merch for sale? There's a lot of great botanical

theme prints in our apparel shop, and you can find a size, color, and style that works for you. Merch is such a great way to help Indefensive Plants and look cool in the process, so go check it out. I put those links in the show notes over at Indefensiveplants.com or at the top, just click on apparel. But anyway, on with the show.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Indefensive Plants Podcast, the official podcast of IndefensiblePlants.com. What's up? This is your host, Matt. Welcome to the show. How is everyone doing this week? I'm doing phenomenal because we are exploring one of my favorite places in the whole wide world, the Gulf Coastal Plain. southeastern North America's Gulf Coast is home to so many amazing plant species.

It's a biodiversity hotspot with high rates of endemism, plants that are found nowhere else in the world.

Trying to understand how those plants got there, why this place is so biodiverse, is not an

easy task, but my guest today was not daunted by that.

Joining us to talk about this is Dr. Elizabeth White, who set out to answer some very difficult

questions, but the results are incredible and can impact science across the board.

So I don't want to keep you from that any longer.

Let's just jump right into it without further ado.

Here's my conversation with Dr. Elizabeth White.

I hope you enjoy.

All right, Dr. Elizabeth White, welcome to the podcast. It is so great to have you here. We have a lot to talk about today. But first, tell us a little bit about who you are and what it is you do. Yeah, so my name is Elizabeth. I'm currently at the University of Florida, where I've been a graduate student. I'm finishing up this semester with my PhD. And before that,

I worked with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and a variety of other field jobs.

So my main interests are kind of patterns of endemism, drivers of endemism, and kind of conservation of the southeastern United States more

generally. Excellent. You are in a very charmed place to have all those interests and passions.

What brought you to this world, though? Was it a plant-based sort of intro or just biology in

general and you're in a beautiful spot to kind of take a bite off of all of it.

Yeah, yeah. So I guess, yeah, kind of a mix. I definitely grew up with sort of an appreciation for

nature, sort of like a hippie family. We did a lot of hiking and things like that around Florida.

So I've always been very grateful kind of the forests and wildlife we have here.

But basically kind of when I got to college and started learning about like evolution,

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