Plant Conservation Science and Practice: The Role of Botanic Gardens

Only a green world, rich in plants, can sustain us and the millions of other species with which we share this planet. But, in an era of global change, nature is on the retreat. Like the communities they form, many plant species are becoming rarer, threatened even to the point of extinction. The worldwide community of almost three thousand botanic gardens are holders of the most diverse living collections of plants and have the unique potential to conserve plant diversity. Conservation biology is a fast moving and often controversial field, and, as the contributions within these pages from experts in the field demonstrate, plant conservation is multifaceted, mirroring the complexity of the biodiversity it aims to protect, and striving not just to protect threatened plants but to preserve ecosystem services and secure the integrity of the biosphere.

Stephen Blackmore is Queen's Botanist and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (RBGE), and Chairman of Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) and the UK Government's Darwin Initiative. He has formerly been Regius Keeper of RBGE (1999 to 2013) and Keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum (1990 to 1999).

Sara Oldfield, awarded an OBE in 2016 for conservation and protection of wild tree species, is co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Special Survival Commission (SSC) Global Tree Specialist Group. From 2005 to 2015, she led the work of Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) as Secretary General.