There are many elements of biodiversity, from genetics and phenotypic diversity to functional diversity. How do you track that you’re conserving it? In a new paper Giacomo Puglielli asks: Can we leverage botanical gardens to study global plant functional diversity? He argues that given botanical gardens aim to conserve plants from across the globe: “…it is reasonable to expect that a species assemblage in a botanical garden is a representative random sample of global vegetation.” So botanical gardens could help us study plant adaptations worldwide.
The collection of plants in a garden will have a spectrum of traits that vary in plant height, seed mass, leaf area and so on. Puglielli proposes studying this at any botanical garden and comparing the local spectrum against the global spectrum. This way, botanists can see how climate, soil, and other conditions affect the development and adaptation of plants.
This approach could allow us to conserve plant diversity more effectively. Not only would individual gardens preserve plants, but teams of gardens with different environments could also preserve the diversity within a plant species. He also says it’s a new way to study global plant traits without extensive fieldwork. He also thinks that this kind of work would help communicate with the public the role botanic gardens have in preserving biodiversity.
The potential of botanical gardens to serve as laboratories for studying global functional diversity remains untapped. By leveraging this potential, we could deliver a new framework to assess the success of global botanical gardens in preserving a key diversity facet that has so far received little attention.
Puglielli, G. (2024). Can we leverage botanical gardens to study global plant functional diversity? Diversity and Distributions. https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.13915 (OA)
