Saving Species with Small Botanic Gardens
Happy to help our friends at Botanic Gardens Conservation International with their fundraising for small gardens.
Botanic gardens globally conserve more than 40% of threatened plant species in their living collections and seed banks. Many small botanic gardens, however, have limited resources to carry out plant conservation actions, particularly in the most biodiverse regions of the world. For example, Puerto Rico has 19 critically endangered tree species, each with fewer than 50 individuals remaining in the wild. Only four of these species are safely conserved in botanic gardens.
Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) is a membership organisation representing a network of 500 botanic gardens in more than 100 countries, including the largest and most influential gardens in the sector. BGCI is the largest plant conservation network in the world, and aims to collect, conserve, characterise and cultivate samples from all of the world’s plants as an insurance policy against their extinction in the wild and as a source of plant material for human innovation, adaptation and resilience.
BGCI’s mission is to mobilise botanic gardens and engage partners in securing plant diversity for the well-being of people and the planet.
BGCI’s Global Botanic Garden Fund helps support small botanic gardens carrying out vital plant conservation action. Each grant will be awarded to enable the garden to better contribute to the conservation of the world’s plant diversity. Already many botanic gardens have benefited from these small conservation grants from BGCI, from seed collecting expeditions targeting threatened plant species in India to providing essential plant collecting equipment to gardens across the Caribbean.
Get Involved
Help BGCI reach more botanic gardens and save more plants. The Big Give Christmas Challenge runs for a week from #GivingTuesday on the 27th November until Tuesday 4th December and all week donations will be doubled until we reach our target of £20,000!
How to Donate
From midday #GivingTuesday 27th November to midday 4th December go to this website to get your donation doubled.
Nibbles: Protected areas, Waley dance, Edible cricket, Plant & people, Open-pollinated seed, Apple origins, Horticultural tree genomics
- Protected Planet report: The Website.
- In praise of cows.
- New edible insect turns up.
- Telling the stories of humanity’s relationship with plants.
- The beauty of open pollination.
- You’d have thought everyone would know where the apple comes from by now.
- The avocado, on the other hand…
Brainfood: Climate resilient crops, Food system limits, Phenotyping double, Sweet sorghum, Melon history, Paying4data, Beercalypse, Village chickens, Breeding 4.0, European maize, Brachiaria ROI
- Are agricultural researchers working on the right crops to enable food and nutrition security under future climates? No. Well, kinda.
- Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits. You need to pursue several. Including those discussed above, presumably.
- Deep Learning for Plant Stress Phenotyping: Trends and Future Perspectives. 3D CNN architectures applied to hyperspectral imaging is the future, apparently.
- Dealing with multi‐source and multi‐scale information in plant phenomics: the ontology‐driven Phenotyping Hybrid Information System. You’re going to need a fancy system to keep track to the data from the above.
- Sweet Sorghum Originated through Selection of Dry, a Plant-specific NAC Transcription Factor Gene. Could be applied to other cereals?
- Repeated domestication of melon (Cucumis melo) in Africa and Asia and a new close relative from India. Once was not enough.
- Paying for Digital Information: Assessing Farmers Willingness to Pay for a Digital Agriculture and Nutrition Service in Ghana. Cheaper is better. There’s a shocker. Oh, and women are more careful with their money.
- Decreases in global beer supply due to extreme drought and heat. 32% decrease in consumption in Argentina, 193% increase in price in Ireland. But clearly the authors have never heard of sorghum beer.
- The role of local adaptation in sustainable production of village chickens. Location, location, location.
- On the Road to Breeding 4.0: Unraveling the Good, the Bad, and the Boring of Crop Quantitative Genomics. Beyond breeding on predicted phenotypes, it’s sort of breeding for predicted environments.
- Maize yields over Europe may increase in spite of climate change, with an appropriate use of the genetic variability of flowering time. You don’t even need Breeding 1.0, if you deploy existing diversity optimally.
- Got forages? Understanding potential returns on investment in Brachiaria spp. for dairy producers in Eastern Africa. Definitely worth a flutter.
A lot of hard work by a lot of people over many years pays off
Including millions of farmers of course.
“Providing permanent funding to the world’s most important crop collections is at the core of the Crop Trust mission,” says @AslaugMarieHaga on the agreement between @CropTrust and @IRRI to fund the genebank in perpetuity. Read more here: https://t.co/PEwQpdmylo #foreverfunding pic.twitter.com/t76INWMwta
— The Crop Trust (@CropTrust) October 12, 2018
And a profile of one of the main people involved.
And my take on the whole thing from the work blog.
Last word to the boss.
The landmark agreement between @irri and @CropTrust was possible thanks to generous contributions from donors that have built the @CropTrust #Endowment fund brick by brick since 2004. Thanks to the US, Germany, Norway, Australia and many others! https://t.co/0RgbRey7jq
— Aaslaug Marie Haga (@AslaugMarieHaga) October 17, 2018