Center for Plant Conservation

The Center for Plant Conservation (CPC), a network of 43 botanical gardens dedicated to preventing plant extinction by ensuring stewardship of rare native plants in living botanical collections, will develop an online platform to communicate and share cutting-edge practices on plant conservation. The online portal will consist of three interacting components: a question and answer forum, CPC best practices guidelines formatted for search engine optimization, and 29 instructional videos featuring leading rare plant conservation experts demonstrating specific curation methods. To maximize the impact of the platform on training the next generation of professionals, the project team will actively invite gardens with emerging conservation programs to join the community of practice through a coordinated outreach campaign. Project evaluation methods will include surveying the intended audience of botanical professionals, reviewing web analytics to determine the growth and engagement of the online community, and assessing the increased number of rare plant species in the CPC National Collection of Endangered Plants.