Ten years ago the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria embarked on an ambitious project to collect, treat and distribute storm water from the catchment within and around the botanic garden. The infrastructure of wetlands filtration, a sophisticated water ...

The adoption of a Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) in 2002 and its subsequent renewal in 2010 were significant milestones for the Convention on Biological Diversity. Not only did this strategy, its objectives and targets provide a valuable...

Extinction rates are expected to increase during the Anthropocene. Current extinction rates of plants and many animals remain unknown. This study represents the first effort to quantify extinctions among the vascular flora of North America north of...

The restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change
mitigation.We mapped the global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4 billion hectares
of canopy cover could exist under the current climate....

The format of this edited volume offers each of the three communities (natural history museums, botanical gardens, zoological gardens) the opportunity to present their cutting-edge research and communications outreach activities. In addition, this...

Maintaining a living plant collection is the most common method of ex situ conservation for plant
species that cannot be seed banked i.e. “exceptional” species. Viability of living collections, and their value for future conservation efforts,...

Ash tree species in North America are under mortal threat from the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB), now in 35 states and five Canadian provinces. There are ongoing efforts to conserve this native tree species by producing genetically diverse, resistant...

The Red List of US Oaks report details for the first time the distributions, population trends, and threats facing all 91 native oak species in the U.S. using the IUCN Red List threat assessment platform, including updated versions of previously...

Oaks are critical to the health and function of forest and shrubland habitats in the United States, but many native oaks are threatened with extinction in the wild. Ongoing conservation efforts exist for some species, but with growing threats and...

Botanic gardens play major roles in plant conservation globally. Since the 1980s, the number of botanic gardens worldwide and their involvement in integrating ex situ and in situ plant conservation has increased signifi cantly, with a growing focus on...

The discipline of horticulture, growing and propagating plants under artificial conditions, has
a centuries-long tradition and has developed into a vital industry of breeding, propagating and
trading ornamental and wild plants around the...

Over the last few decades botanic gardens worldwide have been encouraged to adopt complementary measures for the conservation of plant species from their own
regions, combining in situ conservation efforts with ex situ methods, both in...

These best practices represent a compilation of previous CPC guidelines with updated
recommendations from current research on rare plant conservation. Seed science is a rapidly growing field. To keep abreast of changes in technology and practice...

They don’t make the headlines the way charismatic animals such as rhinos and elephants do. But there are thousands of critically endangered plants in the world, and a determined group of botanists are ready to go to great lengths to save them.

The below case studies were collected and shared in a September 2018 Newsletter from the Center for Plant Conservation. 

Based on an interview with Denise Knapp, Director of...

In a pollen supplementation experiment, fruit or seed production by flowers exposed to natural pollination is compared to that following hand pollination either by pollen supplementation (i.e. manual outcross pollen addition without bagging) or manual...

For many species and seed sources used in restoration activities, specific seed germination
requirements are often unknown. Because seed dormancy and germination traits can be
constrained by phylogenetic history, related species are often...

Ulmus americana (American elm) was an important urban tree in North America prior to the introduction of the Dutch elm disease pathogen in 1930. Subsequently, urban and community forests were devastated by the loss of large canopies. Tree improvement...

This article covers tests conducted to better understand spatial and climatic patterns of diversification in the Orchidaceae, an angiosperm family characterized by high levels of species diversity and rarity. Globally, does orchid diversity correlate...

Access and benefit-sharing (ABS) refers to the way in which genetic resources
may be accessed, and how the benefits that result from their use are shared
between the people or countries using the resources (users) and the people or...