As of March 2024, Mt. Cuba Center holds Quercus boyntonii in living collection.

Gardens are a great place to preserve rare species but they are often likely to have low genetic diversity due to two reasons: gardens often get seeds from another garden or they simply collect seeds from the same places other gardens have collected from knowing that it is a good seed source. The purpose of this study is to determine the amount of sampling required to ideally create a living collection. IMLS funded this project to ultimately answer this question for ten species and then compare findings among them . The first question as it pertains to Quercus boyntonii is how much genetic diversity is in ex-situ collections now: (1) Sampled what's in wild: n=246 trees; (2) Sampled ex-situ: n=77 ex-situ (14 gardens) with about half of this is seed collected in 2015. (3) Genotype: about 785 alleles captured.

The Morton Arboretum seeks to understand how genetic variation is influenced by the environment and human activities in order to develop the best action plan to preserve genetic variation. Genetic diversity is the foundation that any species relies on for adapting to future conditions so no species can persist in the long term especially under rapid environment change or disease without a good genetic base. Gardens are a great place to preserve rare species but they are often likely to have low genetic diversity due to two reasons: gardens often get seeds from another garden or they simply collect seeds from the same places other gardens have collected from knowing that it is a good seed source. The purpose of this study is to determine the amount of sampling required to ideally create a living collection. IMLS funded this project to ultimately answer this question for ten species and then compare findings among them . The first question as it pertains to Quercus boyntonii is how much genetic diversity is in ex-situ collections now: (1) Sampled what's in wild: n=246 trees; (2) Sampled ex-situ: n=77 ex-situ (14 gardens) with about half of this is seed collected in 2015. (3) Genotype: about 785 alleles captured. The second question is whether this process could be improved by means of: (1) Take the wild genetic dataset and use an algorithm and re-sample it; select from that genetic dataset a different number of trees and different number of populations, calculate the genetic diversity in those sets and then conclude how well that sampling would perform. (2) Calculate that if 11 trees were selected from each of 4 populations the same diversity would be achieved as in the current 77 accessions. (3) The main point is while these collections are capturing appreciable amounts of genetic diversity they are not ideal. They could be smaller or they could be larger and capture more genetic diversity. Main messages from this lecture are as follows: (1) Sample more! 50 to 100+ individual trees to conserve genetic variation of rare species. (2) Sample from more rather than fewer maternal accessions! In turn, this can help to mindfully use space and funds and to justify further needs and expeditions. (Hoban et al. 2018)