Conservation News & Highlights

The Center for Plant Conservation’s National Office team and our network of Conservation Partners have been hard at work to advance our shared mission to save plants from extinction.

From CPC hosting our first-ever Native Plant Summit event and The Huntington facilitating an educational cryopreservation workshop, to new conservation-focused publications, our network continues to make meaningful strides to safeguard the rare and endangered plants of North America.

Read on for a round-up of the latest conservation events, news, and highlights.

Background photo: Delphinium oreganum in bloom in situ in Oregon.

2023 Native Plant Summit

Last month, CPC was thrilled to present its inaugural summit event, Unleashing the Power of Native Plants: A Resilient Future for Our Planet, which took place in Boston, MA, at the renowned Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The summit served as a platform for esteemed experts, professionals, and advocates from related fields to come together and discuss the importance of protecting and conserving native plants and their habitats as well as the pivotal role of plant species in establishing sustainable responses to global environmental crises.

CPC was honored to host distinguished scientists and conservationists from throughout its nationwide network of botanical organizations for a keynote presentation and panel discussion during the summit to share insights into this conservation model. The event’s keynote speaker, Dr. William (Ned) Friedman, Director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, was joined by an expert speaker panel including Dr. Emily E.D. Coffey, Vice President of Conservation & Research at Atlanta Botanical Garden; Wesley Knapp, Chief Botanist of NatureServe; and Dr. Lucinda McDade, Executive Director & Judith B. Friend Director of Research at California Botanic Garden.

The lively panel discussion highlighted the critical urgency, challenges, and opportunities in our network’s shared goal to save plants from extinction, with an overarching theme for success: collaboration. By working together and developing partnerships—with fellow conservation organizations, federal agencies, funders, plant enthusiasts, and more—we can amplify our efforts and save more plants than would ever be possible alone. CPC looks forward to hosting future summit events in 2024 as part of our 40th anniversary celebrations.

CPC is grateful to our network of plant conservationists from 74 world-class botanical gardens, arboretums, and other plant-focused organizations that collaboratively work to save the 4,400 most rare and endangered plants of the United States, its territories, and Canada, throughout their native range.

This event was generously sponsored by:

Corient

Cryopreservation Workshop at The Huntington

For exceptional species that cannot be stored long-term using conventional seed banking methods, alternative storage methods such as tissue culture and cryopreservation are necessary for their long-term conservation. This area of plant conservation is a pioneering investigative field because species-specific protocols are unknown for many rare plant species.

To share knowledge from their own conservation program, The Huntington recently hosted a four-day workshop geared to botanic garden professionals to introduce both the theory and practice of plant cryobiotechnology and offer hands-on training in a laboratory environment. Trainings like this help educate and empower our fellow plant conservation practitioners, and help advance our shared mission to save rare and endangered plants from extinction.

Recent Publications

San Diego Thornmint (Acanthomintha ilicifolia) Populations Differ in Growth and Reproductive Responses to Differential Water Availability: Evidence from a Common Garden Experiment. Plants 2023, 12, 3439.

Heineman, K.D.; Anderson, S.M.; Davitt, J.M.; Lippitt, L.; Endress, B.A.; Horn, C.M.

The Center for Plant Conservation (CPC) collaborated with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s plant conservation team to analyze data from a common garden experiment where plants of the federally threatened San Diego thornmint were subjected to water stress. The study found that plants grown from seeds collected at populations with higher annual rainfall created more seeds, especially under water stress, than plants grown from seed collected at drier locations. The seed production of this species is of particular interest to CPC because San Diego thornmint will be one of two species that receives detailed genomic analysis as part CPC’s new IMLS-funded seed bulking study.

Learn more.

Identifying predictors of translocation success in rare plant species. Conservation Biology, 2023

Joe Bellis, Oyomoare Osazuwa-Peters, Joyce Maschinski, Matthew J. Keir, Elliott W. Parsons, Thomas N. Kaye, Michael Kunz, Jennifer Possley, Eric Menges, Stacy A. Smith, Daniela Roth, Debbie Brewer, William Brumback, James J. Lange, Christal Niederer, Jessica B. Turner-Skoff, Megan Bontrager, Richard Braham, Michelle Coppoletta, Karen D. Holl, Paula Williamson, Timothy Bell, Jayne L. Jonas, Kathryn McEachern, Kathy L. Robertson, Sandra J. Birnbaum, Adam Dattilo, John J. Dollard Jr., Jeremie Fant, Wendy Kishida, Peter Lesica, Steven O. Link, Noel B. Pavlovic, Jackie Poole, Charlotte M. Reemts, Peter Stiling, David D. Taylor, Jonathan H. Titus, Priscilla J. Titus, Edith D. Adkins, Timothy Chambers, Mark W. Paschke, Katherine D. Heineman, Matthew A. Albrecht.

This article emerged from one of the component databases that now makes up the CPC Reintroduction Database, the REDCap database compiled by Matthew Albrecht and Oyomoare Osazuwa-Peters from Missouri Botanical Garden. The work contains important insights about the predictors of translocation success including that founders size (the number of plants planted) and habitat quality strongly influence reintroduction outcomes.

Learn more.