Missouri Botanical Garden

The Missouri Botanical Garden will lead a research project to address gaps in general living collection guidelines in order to better manage ex situ species conservation in botanical gardens. Ex situ species conservation is the maintenance of species outside their native habitat in intensively managed living collections, and it is increasingly required to safeguard imperiled plant species for future conservation or restoration. The garden will employ a laboratory specialist and two post-doc fellows to assist in carrying out project activities including selection of plant material for study, conducting seed stratification and propagation of plants, measuring the phenotypes on the plants at specific development stages, and extracting and analyzing DNA for genotyping. The team will use this information along with simulations to design ex situ collections that maximize the representation of different kinds of variation under the real-life limitations of living collections. While this project will focus on six priority plant species of conservation concern, the resulting research tools will ensure that conservation geneticists, living collection managers, and restoration ecologists can more efficiently and effectively manage or use ex situ plant collections for conservation.