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The Collection, Maintenance, and Environmental Importance, of the Genetic Resources of Wild Plants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Peter A. Thompson
Peter A. Thompson
Affiliation:
Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew), Wakehurst Place, Ardingly, Sussex, England.
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Extract

Plants are major factors conditioning an environment, and conservation of particular environments depends fundamentally on the maintenance of existing plant communities. In many parts of the world, the destruction of such communities is occurring so rapidly and so completely that entire natural systems are subject to, or threatened with, total destruction. In such cases artificial methods of conserving plant germplasm for ultimate regeneration, for supplementing natural populations, for study, or for use by Man as an economic resource, may be of great significance as one possible means of averting total loss. Under less extreme pressures, the availability of representative propagules of significant taxa or populations may be of crucial assistance as an aid to research directed towards a better understanding of factors affecting survival or competitive advantage in the wild, or as a means of providing stocks for assessment of the potential economic value of existing reserves of wild species.

This paper discusses methods of recording, maintaining, and evaluating, collections of populations of wild species. Plant resources of this kind are extremely vulnerable when maintained under artificial conditions, and a very high proportion of collections are lost within a few years, remain unavailable for general use, or fail to be used owing to inadequate documentation. Conservation of plant germ-plasm as an international resource, in a usable form, depends on a wide acceptance and practice of greatly improved methods of documentation, and requires the creation of effective organizations for surveying, maintaining, and coordinating, plant resources on an international scale.

Type
Main Papers
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1975 , pp. 223 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 1975

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