The world’s botanic gardens must pull together to protect global plant biodiversity in the face of the extinction crisis, amid restrictions on wild-collecting, say researchers.
A major study of botanic gardens around the world has revealed their struggles with one fundamental aim: to safeguard the world’s most threatened plants from extinction.
Researchers analysed a century’s worth of records - from 1921 to 2021 - from fifty botanic gardens and arboreta currently growing half a million plants, to see how the world’s living plant collections have changed over time.
The results suggest that the world’s living collections have collectively reached peak capacity, and that restrictions on wild plant collecting around the world are hampering efforts to gather plant diversity on the scale needed to study and protect it.
Curator of Cambridge University Botanic Garden Professor Samuel Brockington, who led the work, said: “A concerted, collaborative effort across the world’s botanic gardens is now needed to conserve a genetically diverse range of plants, and to make them available for research and future reintroduction into the wild.”
Read the full article:Botanic Gardens must team up to save wild plants from extinction
Reference: Cano, A. et al: ‘Insights from a century of data reveal global trends in ex situ living plant collections.’ Nature Ecology and Evolution, January 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41559-024-02633-z
Image: Cambridge University Botanic Garden. Credit: Howard Rice.