The North American Collections Assessment

It is true. No one knows how many threatened North American plant species exist in living collections. The North American Collections Assessment is engaging living plant, seed bank, and tissue culture collections in order to define the breadth of conservation potential in the North American garden community and we appreciate your support in making this project a success.

Goals of the North American Collections Assessment

BGCI-US will use data in BGCI's online PlantSearch database to analyze North American threatened species representation in public garden collections, identify synergies and gaps, and help guide collections management, botanical research, and conservation efforts at the global, continental, and individual garden levels.

Ultimately, the North American Collections Assessment will:

Establish a baseline for ex situ plant conservation in North America and identify threatened taxa currently represented in living collections (and threatened taxa currently not present in living collections).
Share assessment results with the world in a freely-available report entitled Conserving North America's Threatened Plants, in which PlantSearch data contributors will be recognized.
Support a global analysis to be presented by BGCI as a key contribution of the world’s botanic gardens towards the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. All collections information uploaded to PlantSearch before August 1, 2010 will be included in BGCI’s North American and global analyses of plant collections, in order to provide a comprehensive analysis for the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (to be held in Nagoya, Japan, October 2010).

Calling All Collections Managers

Contributing to conservation while gaining important information about your collection has never been so easy!

The North American Collections Assessment provides a free and easy way for gardens to join a global conservation
effort by uploading a simple spreadsheet of taxa held in your collections to the PlantSearch database.

Contribute your garden’s data online by the August 1 deadline, and be included and recognized in a report on
Conserving North America’s Threatened Plants.

Benefits for Your Garden

Plan to upload your garden’s plant list in 2010. It's fast, free, and best of all, it provides benefits to your institution.
What could be better?

Demonstrate the value of public gardens: Help us find out how many plants truly are safeguarded in the collections
of public gardens in North America - and how many that are not. For contributing, your garden will be recognized as a collaborator of the North American Collections Assessment.
Receive a FREE plant conservation audit: PlantSearch easily identifies the globally threatened species in plant collections, and it's fast! You can access an online list of all taxa in your collection and any known conservation status within 24 hours of your data upload. PLUS, you will receive additional feedback on rarity in cultivation, and possible misspellings or questionable scientific names for your entire collection.

New! In addition to the IUCN Red Lists, PlantSearch now cross-checks your plant list with NatureServe G-Ranks for North America - hundreds of dollars worth of conservation data, at your fingertips within 24 hours!
Share your collections with the world: Uploading your collections data connects your garden with thousands of institutions and researchers via the online PlantSearch portal. As a result, gardens can anonymously receive requests via PlantSearch for plants, herbarium specimens, or information from all over the world. For reference, the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University anonymously receives research requests on the order of one every month-and-a-half via PlantSearch, and requests are often for species that are quite common but difficult for researchers to locate.

And Your Collections Data will be Secure!

To protect collections of rare and valuable species, the public version of PlantSearch does not identify which gardens hold which species. Instead, individuals can use the PlantSearch database to send blind requests to all institutions that report holding a given species – and gardens can choose how to respond on an individual basis.