The Global Conservation Consortia (GCC)

This report will showcase the variety of actions undertaken over the years and discuss some of the key lessons learnt, but above all it will provide a platform to appreciate the crucial role that civil society actors and local communities play in protecting threatened species in Africa.

Conserving critically endangered species may involve translocation, assisted migration, introduction, or reintroduction to suitable sites. The African Black Walnut faces extinction in Benin, because of the small size of its population and the habitat degradation from agriculture, forest fires, and logging. Our solution has focused on seed germination, seedling growth, and introduction into protected forest ecosystems. One of the foremost challenges in this solution lies in identifying appropriate microsites that can support the species restoration. Thus, we have introduced seedlings into three protected forest ecosystems, with significant differences in terms of soil properties. One of the three sites, the Lama Forest Reserve (LFR), exhibits the highest nutrient levels and optimal conditions for plant growth. These favorable conditions led to the impressive growth of the species at the LFR. Furthermore, the species was fruited within five years, demonstrating the potential for its reproduction and dispersal in these forests.

River dolphins still swim in some of the world’s greatest rivers, but all six surviving species are threatened with extinction. This site provides the best global source of knowledge and solutions that can boost efforts to safeguard these iconic animals – and benefit the people and nature that depend on their rivers.

In 2010, the updated Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity included as its first target (Target 1) the need for ‘An online flora of all known plants.’ With this background in mind, in January 2012 in St Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., representatives from four institutions: the Missouri Botanical Garden, the New York Botanical Garden, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (all members of the Global Partnership for Plant Conservation, GPPC) took the initiative to meet and discuss how to achieve GSPC Target 1 by 2020. The meeting resulted in a proposed outline of the scope and content of a World Flora Online (WFO), as well as a decision to form an international consortium of institutions and organisations to collaborate on providing that content.

The WFO project was subsequently launched in India, at an event held during the 11th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in October 2012 where the COP also adopted a decision welcoming the WFO initiative. In January 2013 a Memorandum of Understanding on the WFO was opened for signature. Up to the end of March 2023, 51 institutions and organisations had signed the MOU.

The WFO is an open-access, Web-based compendium of the world’s plant species. It is a collaborative, international project, building upon existing knowledge and published Floras, checklists and revisions but will also require the collection and generation of new information on poorly know plant groups and plants in unexplored regions.

The project represents a major step forward in developing a consolidated global information service on the world’s flora.

BGCI’s PlantSearch is a globally unique tool for accessing and sharing information about living collections maintained by botanic gardens and similar organisations. PlantSearch connects living botanical collections to conservationists, educators, horticulturists, researchers, policy makers and many others who are working to save and understand plant diversity.

PlantSearch includes taxon-level data from over 1,100 collections of living/viable plants, seeds, pollen, and tissues, located around the world. Data is provided and managed by staff at individual organisations. BGCI welcomes garden staff to register as an Editor to review and update their collection’s PlantSearch information on an annual basis.

Use PlantSearch to

• Locate and connect with taxa and collections of interest.
• Identify global and regional trends in botanic garden ex situ conservation capacity.
• Get your organisation on its way to achieving BGCI Accreditation.
• Identify botanic garden progress toward implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework, the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC), and other relevant international policies.

As of February 2020, 73 species were considered Extinct in the Wild, and 6,413 were classified as Critically Endangered on the 2019 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The status of a number of these species is in part due to a failure to intervene with emergency action early enough in their decline, as preventing extinction is more likely when efforts are initiated before a species is reduced to a small number of individuals.

The Species Survival Commission’s (SSC) adoption of the One Plan Approach and the provision of technical advice summarised in IUCN Species Survival Commission Guidelines on the Use of Ex situ Management for Species Conservation, encourage deliberative science-based processes of action-plan development by all responsible parties for all populations of a species across the spectrum of management, and provide practical guidance on evaluating the suitability and requirements of an ex situ component for achieving species-conservation objectives, among others.

In 2020, the IUCN World Conservation Congress passed a resolution promoting the integration of in situ (within a species’ natural habitat) and ex situ (in human care outside a species’ natural habitat) conservation interventions by applying the One Plan Approach.