Nation’s favorite plant
At this time of year you see a lot of predictions, but it’s hard to remember them long enough to track how well they do.
A nice exception came in the ChCh Press story about the NZ Plant Conservation Network annual poll for NZ’s favorite plant.
New Zealand may be renowned for its distinctive flora and fauna, but it seems Kiwis prefer endangered herbs and wildflowers over pohutukawa and kowhai.
While earlier polls revealed Kiwi-favourites the pohutukawa and cabbage tree as New Zealanders’ plant of choice, in recent years lesser known species such as tree nettle, Cook’s scurvy grass and willowherb have climbed the ranks.
The results are now out, as the Herald reports, and the top three are kauri, pohutukawa, and puriri. Northern and southern rata and one of the cabbage tree species are also in the top ten, so familiar, common, distinctive trees did well this year.
Predicting results of small self-selected polls is very hard, because the results can be very sensitive to voting by enthusiasts or enemies of one of the candidates. That’s why the results aren’t very useful for telling you what people think, though they can make for good publicity.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »