Botanical gardens need to look to the tropics

A monumental study of the plant species conserved in botanical gardens has just been published, and is getting quite a lot of traction in the media. The headline numbers are impressive: “botanic gardens manage at least 105,634 species, equating to 30% of all plant species diversity, and conserve over 41% of known threatened species.” It is worrying, however, that three quarters of the species that are absent from botanical gardens collections are tropical in origin. Lots of hot, sweaty work still do be done.

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