The future of plant conservation and the role of botanic gardens

The papers included in this special issue are mostly based on presentations made at the IABG international conference held at Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden, China, November 2016, which addressed the roles that botanic gardens, both in China and elsewhere, can play in national biodiversity conservation strategies, such as maintaining and conserving plant material ex situ and in contributing to the recovery of threatened plant species, reintroductions and other translocations. It also looked beyond botanic gardens and addressed how to work and plan much more closely with other practitioners. China is one of the world's richest countries in terms of plant diversity and also has a high level of endemism. However, plant diversity in China is increasingly threatened due to rapid industrialization, extensive urbanization, and explosive economic growth. Twenty percent of China's total higher plants are threatened with extinction (Huang, 2011, Huang et al., 2013). As a result, effective protection of plant diversity is a major problem and challenge that has to be faced and the paper by Charles Cannon (pp. 331–337) gives examples of the ways that China is addressing these issued. Part of this meeting focused on an assessment of China's existing plant conservation policy and the state of implementation. It discussed how to develop a plant conservation programme that takes into account the special characteristics of the Chinese situation and context, and ways of promoting cooperation between plant conservation research institutions and nature reserves, with a view to ensuring the conservation of Chinese plant resources through the adoption of efficient and effective procedures and protocols. These concerns are also faced by the rest of the world, and the speakers included leading plant conservation experts and researchers from abroad who shared their experience, and joined with key Chinese experts and with the leaders and plant protection specialists from the State Forestry Administration, provincial and municipal forestry bureaus in exploring these issues and proposing solutions.