Metacollections: mobilize gardens and engage partners to secure plant diversity

There are an estimated 3,500 botanic gardens worldwide maintaining over 40% of known plant diversity in their living plant, seed, and tissue collections. Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) works to facilitate and connect this global community through metacollection development, and serves as a knowledge hub to share best practices and provide guidance. BGCI’s globally unique data tools offer powerful information to support institutional, regional, and species-level conservation capacity gap analyses, and serve as a foundation for Global Conservation Consortia and other metacollection partners. The newly rebuilt GardenSearch and PlantSearch data tools are central to these initiatives, and ultimately aim to support metacollection development for successful, long-term conservation outcomes.