| Abstract Detail
Biodiversity Informatics & Herbarium Digitization Gostel, Morgan [1], Meyer, Abby [2], linsky, Jean [3]. How does your garden grow? Analyzing living collections for conservation and research priorities using integrated gap analysis tools. Recent assessments suggest that globally, botanic gardens are home to a remarkable amount of plant diversity, including at least 75% of all vascular plant families, 60% of genera, and 30% of species. It is clear these institutions and their living collections are important centers for ex situ conservation, education, and research. The priorities of botanic gardens align closely with those of conservation strategies/objectives (e.g., the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, GSPC), as well as priorities for research, including common garden experiments, plant-insect interaction studies, and sources of high-quality plant tissue for genomics. The Global Genome Initiative for Gardens (GGI-Gardens) was founded in 2015 with the goal of preserving and understanding the genomic diversity of plants on Earth. This mission is being achieved by building partnerships with botanic gardens worldwide that emphasize voucher collection and tissue preservation from living collections. To date, GGI-Gardens has partnered with 25 botanic gardens around the world, with 16 active collecting programs that have collected nearly 20,000 DNA vouchers. Collection priorities are currently focused on families and genera that have not yet been preserved in a genomic biorepository and/or do not have a sequence available in Genbank. Together with organizations such as Botanic Gardens Conservation International, U.S.(BGCI-US), the United States Botanic Garden, and the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN), GGI-Gardens is working to assess these collection priorities and emphasize threatened and endangered taxa. Prioritizing the sampling effort is complex, but has been simplified through the development of tools from both BGCI and GGI that allow researchers to assess the status of taxa as present/absent from the GGBN database, in living collection inventories via BGCI’s PlantSearch database, and their conservation status via ThreatSearch. Gap analysis results from this global assessment are presented here, highlighting user friendly tools; features for stakeholders at botanic gardens, herbaria, and biorepositories alike; and statistics that highlight the value of botanic gardens. This poster will help connect gardens, researchers, and other stakeholders to resources for enhanced collaboration and that add value to collections for conservation and research.
1 - Botanical Research Institute Of Texas, 1700 University Dr., Fort Worth, TX, 76107, United States
2 - United States
3 - Botanical Research Institute of Texas, 1700 University Dr., Botanical Research Institute of Texas, Fort Worth, TX, 76107, United States
Keywords:
ex situ conservation
botanical gardens
genomics
international partnerships.
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: P, Biodiversity Informatics & Herbarium Digitization Posters
Location: Virtual/Virtual
Date: Monday, July 27th, 2020
Time: 5:00 PM Time and date to be determined
Number: PBI004
Abstract ID:833
Candidate for Awards:None |
