Degrees focusing in plant systematics focus predominantly on the identification and characterization of plant species. The discipline includes, but is not limited to, plant description and taxonomy. An ongoing shortage of qualified research in biological systematics, particularly plant systematics, makes this a good field for future employment prospects. Unfortunately, research grants for work in plant systematics are much more difficult to find than those for research into molecular or cellular biology. The City University of New York remains a top school in which to pursue this branch of the plant sciences.
Forestry is generally seen as a vocational degree rather than a research degree, with graduates generally working closely with organizations with interests in either resource extraction or preservation. Yale University has the world's most respected program in forestry, a branch of their biology and environmental science schools. Because much contemporary research in forestry is interdisciplinary, double degrees are offered in anthropology and law to doctoral students in this branch of plant science.
Molecular and cellular biology together form the hottest field of research in the plant sciences. Washington University at St. Louis has a leading program in this field. Popular topics for research include improving our understanding of how genes are turned on by transcription factors or shut off by chromatin modifications, how membrane-associated protein complexes are assembled and regulated, and chemical methods for combatting viral pathogenesis. Much of the funding in the field comes from industrial agribusiness, which supports work that may lead to the engineering of useful new traits in crop plants.
The field of ethnobotany focuses on the relationship between people and the plants in their environment. It is necessarily interdisciplinary, incorporating tools from anthropology, organic chemistry and religious studies, as needed. Much of the research and funding in the field focuses on research in medical anthropology or in pharmaceutical drug discovery. The funding for this line of research has dwindled considerably since its heyday in the 1980s, leaving the discipline in a state of crisis. At that time, Harvard University had the world's most prestigious program in ethnobotany; today, it does not even have a program. Currently, the University of Hawai'i at Manoa has the only remaining undergraduate program in ethnobotany in the U.S.