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.
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.
Read more at University of Cambridge
Image: Cambridge University Botanic Garden was the first botanic garden in the UK to grow this endangered tree species. It is distributed in at least 372 botanic gardens globally. (Credit: Cambridge University Botanic Garden)
