TITLE:
Botanic Garden Collections—An Under-Utilised Resource
AUTHORS:
Alex Hudson, Paul Smith, Benedetta Gori, Suzanne Sharrock
KEYWORDS:
Botanic Gardens, Arboreta, Socio-Economic Plants, Sustainable Use, Conservation
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Plant Sciences,
Vol.12 No.9,
September
23,
2021
ABSTRACT: Botanic gardens and arboreta
around the world are repositories of diverse collections
of useful plants in their gardens and seed banks. However, the crop and
forestry communities often overlook these collections, and so they are an
underutilised resource. For example, in analysis of the ex situ conservation status of 6,941 socio-economically important
plant taxa using data from forestry and crop collections, but omitted
collections in botanic gardens and arboreta.
In this paper, we compared the socio-economically important taxa identified by Khoury et
al. from GRIN-Global World Economic Plants (WEP) with data on living and
seed collections held in botanic garden and arboreta, as recorded in BGCI’s global PlantSearch and ThreatSearch datasets.
This analysis produced an assessment of the proportion of these taxa
that are found in botanic gardens and arboreta, the number of gardens or
arboreta they are found in and what potential they have to contribute to
research, conservation and sustainable use. We also compared the species
conservation comprehensiveness assessments carried out by Khoury et al. with the threatened status of
those species, according to the IUCN Red List and other threat assessment
methodologies in order to ascertain whether threatened, useful species are
well-conserved in botanic gardens. At least 6017 of the 6941 socio-economically important WEP taxa (86.7%) were currently
found in the living and seed collections of botanic gardens and arboreta with
1456 taxa (21%) held in >40 collections. Khoury et al. suggested that 6748 of the WEP taxa are of either medium or
high conservation priority. However, our analysis suggested that just 1153 taxa
have been assessed as threatened at a national or international level. We
concluded that the botanic garden/arboretum community can contribute
significantly to plant conservation and sustainable development, including data
and material from many collections of socio-economically important taxa that
are not present in the crop and forestry communities. We examined the reasons
why botanic garden/arboreta collections are currently under-utilised and make
recommendations for increasing their visibility and use.