2025 CPC National Meeting

The Center for Plant Conservation is thrilled to host its 2025 National Meeting May 7-10, at Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, Missouri. This annual event unites plant conservation professionals, researchers, and advocates to exchange insights, share experiences, and build strategies for advancing rare and endangered plant stewardship.

This year’s theme, Best Practices: Proven Methods & New Perspectives in Rare Plant Conservation, highlights the tried-and-true methodologies and emerging approaches that drive successful conservation efforts. Together, we’ll explore the latest strategies in plant conservation and stewardship, delve into innovative techniques and evolving best practices, and discuss collaborative solutions to address the growing challenges—as well as promising solutions and opportunities—impacting imperiled plants and their ecosystems.

The conference program will feature updates from the CPC National Office on network-wide initiatives, dynamic lightning talks from CPC’s network of Conservation Partners, and presentations centered on both well-established best practices and innovative perspectives in plant conservation. We invite Institutional and Individual Conservation Partners to submit presentation abstracts that align with this year’s theme, Best Practices: Proven Methods & New Perspectives in Rare Plant Conservation, focusing on successful applications of proven strategies, creative solutions to complex challenges, lessons learned from the field, or topics that otherwise adhere to the conference theme.

Conference-goers will also have to opportunity to join a pre-conference workshop hosted by the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development and Horticulture Division team on Wednesday, May 7, as well as a post-conference field trip on Saturday, May 10, to Shaw Nature Reserve, Missouri Botanical Garden’s 2,441-acre educational, research, and habitat restoration and reconstruction site. Space for both the workshop and field trip are limited and on a first come, first served basis.

Join us in St. Louis to celebrate the ingenuity, dedication, and partnerships that empower plant conservation efforts and ensure the survival of the world’s rarest plants for generations to come.

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Pre-Conference Workshop: Wednesday, May 7, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Ex situ collections in botanical gardens aim to safeguard imperiled plant species by preserving existing intraspecific variation for future conservation and restoration. However, general guidelines for ex situ plant conservation, when applied in the absence of genetic or genomic information, will perform well in some cases and poorly in others. In 2022, the Missouri Botanical Garden was awarded a National Leadership grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for a project that aims to develop a model that botanical gardens may broadly adopt to understand and more efficiently conserve multiple forms of intraspecific variation in ex situ living collections. Taking advantage of the increasing availability of genomic data and the ability of botanical gardens to manage living collections as common garden experiments, this model aims to assess neutral and adaptive intraspecific variation in imperiled plant species.

As part of this project, members of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development and Horticulture Division will lead a training workshop intended for those who manage and utilize ex situ collections in plant conservation. The goal of the workshop is to share protocols that can be readily adopted by many botanical gardens to advance their ex situ conservation programs, combining genomic data and common garden experiments. The half-day workshop will consist of short lectures on specific protocols that botanical gardens can follow to assess both neutral and adaptive genomic and phenotypic variation for a species of interest and use the data to design optimized ex situ collections for that plant species. Participants will also learn best practices for tracking maternal lines, propagation, and research in botanical garden collections with Missouri Botanical Garden’s Living Collection Management System (LCMS). The workshop will conclude with a tour of common garden experiments and phenotyping protocols for six imperiled plant species under study at Missouri Botanical Garden’s Oertli Nursery.

Registration fee: $25/person

Registration for the workshop is sold out. Please contact info@saveplants.org if you would like to be added to the waitlist.

For a detailed workshop schedule, please scroll below to the four-day meeting agenda under the “Happenings” section. 

Post-conference Field Trip: Saturday, May 10, 8:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Join a field trip experience to Shaw Nature Reserve, the Missouri Botanical Garden’s 2,441-acre educational, research, and habitat restoration and reconstruction site. Field trip attendees will tour Missouri Botanical Garden’s seed bank and ecological restoration facilities, and take a walking tour of restored prairies, woodlands, and glades with scenic views of the Meramec River Valley. Access to these sites will require moderate hiking and walking.

Registration fee: $85/person

Registration for the field trip is sold out. Please contact info@saveplants.org if you would like to be added to the waitlist.

For a detailed workshop schedule, please scroll below to the four-day meeting agenda under the “Happenings” section. 

Board of Trustees Meeting

CPC’s Board of Trustees meeting will take place the Wednesday before the CPC National Meeting on May 7, 2025. Board Members will have the opportunity to join the field trip on Saturday May 10, 2025.