Plants for life: - Sacred Seeds Sanctuary

Questionnaire responses illustrated thewide range of areas in which botanicgardens are involved with medicinalplant conservation, the positive effectsof this work and the linkages betweenbotanic gardens and otherconservation agencies.Ex situ conservationEx situ conservation remains the main remitand area of expertise of botanic gardens.It provides an important ‘insurance’ againstthe loss of plant genetic resources, with akey role to play in terms of preservationand species re-introduction programmes,education and research.This role has been defined by theGSPC, specifically Target 8, which callsfor 60% of threatened plant species inaccessible ex situ collections,preferably in the country of origin, and10% of them included in recovery andrestoration programmes.Living collectionsThe conservation of plant resources canbe achieved through different methodssuch as seed banks, in vitro storagemethods, pollen banks and DNA banksas well as the maintenance of livingcollections. This is particularly importantwith threatened medicinal plants whereprotection in the wild may not be realisticin the short-term, or where ex situ workcannot yet be directly linked to in situ.The resources provided by thesecollections are important for in siturecovery programmes.Target 9 of the GSPC calls for 70% ofthe genetic diversity of the majorsocio-economically important plantsconserved.Wuhan Botanic Garden, China hasdeveloped a medicinal plant gardenwith over 800 species for education,research and preservation (Z. Jiang,pers.comm.).A medicinal plant seed bank andherbarium has been developed atAl-Quds University Botanic Gardenin Palestine, to preserve wild nativemedicinal plants (K. Sawalha,pers.comm.).In China, the Shangri-La AlpineBotanical Garden in Yunnan provinceis designing a Tibetan Medicinal PlantsGarden, collecting those species mostcommonly used (Liu, pers.comm.).Chicago Botanic Garden maintainsboth an outdoor collection and a seedbank of local medicinal plant species,for detailed evaluation of active plantcompounds. The identification ofuseful medicinal compounds shouldnot only promote public health butalso underscore the importance ofprotecting native flora.Jardin Botanico de Bahia Blanca inArgentina maintains a display ofmedicinal plant species used on alocal scale (Villamil, pers.comm.).Plant recordsAn essential, defining feature of a botanicgarden is the maintenance of plantrecords on the living collection. Eachrecord typically records the scientificname of the plant and its origin (whetherof known wild origin or cultivated source).Many botanic gardens hold collections ofmedicinal plants – see for example theBGCI Directory of Medicinal PlantCollections in Botanic Gardens (WyseJackson and Dennis, 1998) but the valueof these has never been fully assessed.BGCI maintains the PlantSearch databasewhich records data on plants in botanicgarden collections. As of August 2007 thePlantSearch database held details on over2,540 botanic gardens, 681 of which haveuploaded their species data, totalling505,000 records of approximately 140,000different taxa. The database is availablefor public use, although garden addressesare only accessible after requesting furtherinformation from the garden itself, due tothe valuable nature of some of the plantsheld.As part of the ‘Safety Nets for MedicinalPlants’ project, BGCI has updatedPlantSearch to include information onsome 3,000 medicinal plants species aswell as all plants listed on CITES. We haveobtained over 40 lists of key speciesincluding almost 1,000 species threatenedin the wild due to unsustainableharvesting and habitat destruction (seeAnnex 2). Work is currently underway ona detailed gap analysis of key medicinalplant species in botanic gardencollections and the conservation workbeing done with them, if any.Since botanic gardens hold the largestassemblage of plants outside ofnature, it makes sense to worktowards a global inventory of medicinalplants held in botanic gardens.BGCI is working towards this aim.ResearchBotanic gardens provide a permanentlocation around which an infrastructurecan develop. Around the world, theyhave become centres for the researchand study of disciplines as diverse astaxonomy, ecology, agronomy,horticulture, ethnobotany and habitatrestoration, all of which inform medicinalplant conservation.