New funding opportunity for botanic gardens

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 4, October 2020.

By Morgan R. Gostel¹, Jean Linsky¹, Abby Meyer²

Together with support from the United States Botanic Garden and Botanic Gardens Conservation International, the Global Genome Initiative for Gardens (GGI-Gardens) has announced a new funding opportunity for botanic gardens that supports collection and preservation of genomic tissues new to the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) from botanic gardens. This program will support up to 15 awards of up to $4,500 each.

GGI-Gardens was founded in 2015 with the goal of fulfilling the GGI mission – ­to preserve and understand the genomic diversity of life on Earth ­– for the plant tree of life. Since its beginning in 2015, GGI-Gardens has collected over 400 and 4,500 families and genera of vascular plants, respectively, from 16 active collecting sites and 26 international partners. We hope to collect at least one sample from each family and 50% of genera of plants on Earth. These samples will help facilitate international biodiversity research priorities, such as large-scale genome sequencing projects.

If you are interested in applying, please visit https://www.bgci.org/our-work/services-for-botanic-gardens/global-botanic-garden-fund/bgci-ggi-gardens-partnership-award/

Application deadline: 15 November 2020

GGI-Gardens collecting team in front of the Bartholdi Fountain at the United States Botanic Garden. Left to right: GGI-Gardens intern, Kristen Van Neste; GGI-Gardens Founder and Senior Research Botanist and Curator, Vicki Funk; GGI-Gardens Director, Morgan Gostel; and GGI-Gardens intern, Sarah Gabler. (photo by Kyle Wallick)

¹Botanical Research Institute of Texas and GGI-Gardens, Fort Worth, TX, USA
²Botanic Gardens Conservation International-US, San Marino, CA, USA