Volume 10, Issue 03
October 2007
bulletin
français
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| 4. Plants for life: medicinal plant conservation and botanic gardens, Belinda Hawkins, BGCI
For the past year, BGCI has been working for the conservation of medicinal plant species via our project, ‘Safety nets for medicinal plants’. The first stage of the project was to gather data on key medicinal plant species and upload this information onto the PlantSearch database. This is now complete, so that botanic gardens and other users of PlantSearch can see the medicinal status of some 4,000 plant species in botanic garden collections. We’re continuing with this work, since there are many more plants with medicinal uses, and aim to provide detailed information on key species via an information portal linked to the PlantSearch database. The second phase of the project was undertaking a broad consultation exercise, begun at the Third Global Botanic Gardens Congress in Wuhan, China in April this year. We asked various medicinal plant conservation stakeholders - from botanic gardens to NGOs to Universities to government departments - what they felt the priority medicinal plant species were for conservation action, which conservation methodologies worked best and how BGCI could help them in their work. The response was fantastic and over 80 questionnaires were returned to us back in London.
These responses and other inputs have resulted in the publication of our report; ‘Plants for life: medicinal plant conservation and botanic gardens’, due to be distributed at the end of October this year. As well as outlining the key trade, livelihood and conservation issues surrounding medicinal plants, the report illustrates the many ways in which botanic gardens can and do contribute to protecting the plants that heal us. What came across very clearly was the expansion of the role of botanic gardens; from traditional ex situ conservation to more and more involvement with community work and partnering with other bodies to contribute towards really successful in situ medicinal plant conservation work. Today, the relevance of botanic gardens to medicinal plant conservation is as strong as it was hundreds of years ago, when the very first botanic gardens were developed specifically for medicinal plant cultivation and research. From visionary education initiatives to cutting-edge genetic technology research; the report draws together the inspirational myriad involvement of botanic gardens in medicinal plant conservation and recommends focus areas for future work. We’ve also incorporated much of the feedback received into developing an action plan for medicinal plant conservation by BGCI, building on the data gathered over the past year to begin species specific projects, protecting the plants that protect so many people around the world. This project was supported by the Rufford Maurice Laing Foundation. Please contact BGCI wellbeing@bgci.org
if you are interested to have a copy of the report or to let them
know about your medicinal plant conservation work.
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