From Plant Press, Vol. 8, No. 3 from July 2005.
Effective conservation of biodiversity is dependent upon a firm understanding of the basic biological attributes of species. The immense data on plants and animals contained in the collections of the world’s natural history museums, herbaria, and botanical gardens have always been critical for conservation purposes, but only recently have museum scientists become active in assessing and developing environmental management programs. In a recently published book, Plant Conservation: A Natural History Approach edited by Gary A. Krupnick and W. John Kress (University of Chicago Press), scientists from the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution along with their collaborators have presented a convincing portrait of the importance of museum research for effective conservation assessment and management.
Plant Conservation explores the value of botanical collections and museum science in contemporary biodiversity conservation studies. Plant conservation is explored from a natural history perspective through the actions, observations, and investigations of botanists in the field, herbaria, and laboratory. No less than 27 scientists from the Smithsonian Institution (24 from the Botany Department) participated in writing the book. They were joined by 21 collaborators representing research institutions in the USA, Brazil, England, Germany, Scotland, and Venezuela.
Plant Conservation is launched with a provocative foreword by Dan Janzen and then proceeds with a broad view of plant biodiversity, a consideration of evolutionary and taxonomic consequences of habitat alteration, a review of specific threats to plant diversity (such as invasive species and global climate change), a discussion of the consequences of plant population decline at the ecological, evolutionary, and taxonomic levels, an assessment of techniques for mapping centers of botanical diversity, and, finally, an overview of management strategies that protect plant biodiversity from further decline.
In this book, plants are considered in their broadest sense, including marine algae, unicellular dinoflagellates, lichens, mosses, and flowering plants while a multitude of habitats from all corners of the globe are covered from species-rich tropical rain forests to underwater kelp forests.
Plant Conservation emphasizes the role museums and botanical gardens with their rich holdings of scientific collections and unique perspective on the diversity of life will ultimately play in the future of biodiversity conservation.