A brief history of conservation at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

KEW BULLETIN VOL. 65: 501Y508 (2010) A brief history of conservation at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Ghillean T. Prance Summary. When Princess Augusta and Lord Bute, followed by Sir Joseph Banks and King George III, started gathering plants at Kew, conservation on the site can be said to have begun. Although the primary motive then was to assist the expansion of the British Empire and trade, rare plants were gathered and some became rare or extinct in the wild as their habitats were destroyed. The primary motive in the nineteenth century was not conservation, but the history of conservation at the Royal Gardens at Kew dates back to its very origins. Subsequent regimes at Kew maintained and added to the collections thereby adding to their conservation value. Many early collections are of species now listed within the IUCN categories of endangerment. Environmental awareness and concern had begun by the time that Professor Jack Heslop-Harrison became director and he was the first director actively to initiate specific conservation programmes such as seed banking and work on red data books. From then on conservation became an integral part of the work programme of Kew and the focus on conservation has increased with each subsequent director. This eventually led to the transformation of the embryonic seed banking activities into the Millennium Seed Bank, the largest and most important bank in the world for the conservation of the seeds of wild species. It currently holds just over ten percent of all seed plant species. Conservation at Kew over the past three decades has very much been a balance between ex situ work and in situ activities to help conservation in the overseas areas where Kew scientists have experience. Throughout the history of the gardens there has been a vital interest in economic botany that has developed from moving plants around the empire to much work on the sustainable use of plants and ecosystems thereby better equipping the institution to subsequently work on in situ conservation. Significant conservation activity at Kew has been possible because it is being supported by a solid research programme that includes such areas as systematics and molecular genetics and laboratories, a large herbarium and a large library. Kew has played an important role in stimulating conservation work elsewhere and such units as the Threatened Plants Unit of IUCN and Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) have their roots in Kew. Among other important conservation initiatives have been the creation of a unit to work with the implementation of the CITES treaty on the trade of endangered plants and a legal unit to work on issues of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). There is no doubt that the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew is at the forefront of plant conservation. Key Words. conservation, history, red data books, seed banking. Early years When Princess Augusta declared that she wanted to accumulate all species of plants in her garden at Kew, the long history of plant conservation at Kew began. Although it was many years before the term conservation was used, the fact that some vary rare plants were gathered and grown at Kew meant that ex situ conservation had started thanks to the association between the Princess and John Stuart the third Earl of Bute and the gardening skill of William Aiton who started working for the Princess in 1759. Aiton published his first edition of Hortus Kewensis in 1789 and it includes 3,500 species planted during his first thirty years at Kew. The second edition of the Hortus (Aiton 1810 – 1813) was a five volume work published between 1810 and 1813 and it listed 11,013 species. Since many of these were from areas where the vegetation was under threat even then, conservation at Kew was well underway and has continued in this way ever since to the some 50,000 taxa currently held at Kew. Turrill (1959) quotes Thiselton-Dyer about Princess Augusta: “She died in 1772, but in the preceding 20 years she gave Kew gardens the definitely scientific character which they have since retained.” In the succeeding years, plant collecting for Kew continued firstly to gather a collection of interesting plants at Kew and then, in the reign of King George III with the help of Sir Joseph Banks, to further the goals of the empire. During the time of Banks and later during the directorships of William and Joseph Hooker the primary goal was to collect and study Accepted for publication November 2010. 1 Honorary Research Fellow, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 3AB, UK. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010 502 KEW BULLETIN VOL. 65(4) plants of economic interest. These activities and the growing scientific programme at Kew that was cataloguing the plants of the world in Floras, led to the rapid growth of the herbarium that is now an essential tool for conservation. At the same time the living collections grew considerably. Perhaps some of the plants gathered into Kew from oceanic islands became the most crucial for conservation because it is in these places of high species endemism that species were most threatened by habitat destruction and the introduction of alien species. Conservation at Kew had begun, but it was not yet labelled as such. Table 1 lists a few of the rare plants that were conserved through the early collections of Kew. From early days Kew was receiving plants from all over the world from collectors such as Francis Masson. The conservation of many species was enhanced by the fact that Kew was a generous donor of plants as well, sending consignments to the British Colonies and European botanical gardens and maintaining a mutually beneficial exchange with British nurseries and gardens. For example in 1902 the Natal Botanic Garden presented to Kew a specimen of Encephalartos woodii Hort. which is said to be the last surviving specimen in the world. Embryonic Conservation The publication of Turrill’s book (1959) coincided with the two hundredth anniversary of the Royal Botanic Gardens and it is interesting to see that just fifty years ago there is no mention of conservation. In fact the word conservation is not used anywhere in this volume. A few years later King (1976) published an unofficial history of Kew and again conservation is hardly mentioned. The penultimate sentence of that book, which covered the period up to the end of the directorship of Sir George Taylor, mentions the establishment of work on the Red Data Book for plants. During the tenure of Sir George two things were done to initiate conservation at Kew. First was the contracting of retired Kew botanist Ronald Melville in 1968 to prepare the Red Data Book for plants and second was the establishment in 1968 of a Seed Unit to store seeds under refrigerated conditions. The work on a Red Data Book for plants was suggested to Sir George by Sir Peter Scott the founder of WWF and the then Chairman of the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of IUCN. Melville began to gather data on selected endangered species. This first list of 118 species was issued by IUCN in 1970 and 1971 in loose-leaf folder format as Volume five of a series of Red Data Lists (Melville 1970, 1971). Melville estimated even in the late 1960s that 20,000 species were endangered. His list focussed strongly on island plants from such places as St. Helena, Hawai’i, the Canary Islands, the Seychelles and the Juan Fernandez islands. The initial emphasis of the seed bank was much more on seed physiology and storage rather than conservation. At the time of these activities the destruction of natural environments began to accelerate rapidly and so the next Director of Kew, Professor John Heslop-Harrison was the person who really began to bring conservation seriously into the mission of the Gardens. The Heslop-Harrison era (1971 – 1976) Professor Heslop-Harrison was Director of Kew for the relatively short period of five years, but he deserves a separate section here because it was under him that Table 1. Examples of a few plants collected for Kew in the early days that have now become valuable for conservation. Species Family Origin Date of Kew accession IUCN Category Agave schottii Aloe squarrosa Alsinidendron trinerve Cestrum psittacinum Dioon spinulosum Echinocactus grusonii Encephalartos woodii Erica verticillata Eucommia ulmoides Euphorbia decaryi Hibiscus clayi Laelia anceps Metrosideros carminea Paphiopedilum rothschildianum Sophora toromiro Tecophilaea cyanocrocus Tulipa sprengeri Agavaceae Aloaceae Caryophyllaceae Solanaceae Zamiaceae Cactaceae Cycadaceae Ericaceae Eucommiaceae Euphorbiaceae Malvaceae Orchidaceae Myrtaceae Orchidaceae Fabaceae Tecophilaeaceae Liliaceae USA, Arizona Yemen, Socotra Hawai’i Possibly Mexico Mexico Mexico South Africa South Africa, Cape China Madagascar Hawai’i Mexico New Zealand N.I. Malaysia, Sabah Easter Island Chile Turkey 1921 1967 1961 E E CE 1907 1930 1899 1961 1930 1959 1961 1922, 1941 1965 1963 R E EXT EXT R E E E E E V a EXT EXT a Listed and thought to be extinct, but recently found again in the wild © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010 1972 A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONSERVATION AT THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW conservation became a serious part of the mission of the Gardens. He inherited an embryonic Red Data Book, but was aware that much more needed to be done. On 10th August 1973 a meeting was held at Kew, convened by the SSC Alert Group of IUCN. It was agreed there that an SSC specialist committee on threatened plants was required. Accordingly the SSC created the Threatened Plants Committee at its full meeting on 21 – 22 May 1974 with Gren Lucas as Secretary and Hugh Synge as its Research Assistant. This unit was based in the herbarium at Kew, but was an integral part of IUCN and was also funded by the World Wildlife Fund. Its initial remit was to produce Red Data Books and to maintain databases. The IUCN/WWF staff and Kew staff were managed as one unit by Gren Lucas. Lucas & Synge (1978) published the first hard-bound Red Data Book for plants containing data on 250 carefully selected sample species of threatened and endangered plants from the Melville list. In 1973 the Threatened Plants Unit (TPU) as it was now called, received a challenge from Dr Max Walters, then Director of the University of Cambridge Botanic Garden, to prepare a list of threatened plants of Europe to accompany Flora Europaea of which he was an editor. In 1975 the TPU received funds from the Council of Europe to prepare the list of threatened species of Europe. This book, which went through three drafts, listed 2,100 species and used the taxonomy of Flora Europaea as a basis (IUCN Threatened Plants Committee 1977). Gren Lucas chose the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Biological Conservation to work on the listing of plants for the Caribbean and Latin America. The work on plant listing has progressed far since these early days and today Kew coordinates the GIS-based plant component of the IUCN Sampled Red List Index. In 1973 Duncan Poore, the Director of The Nature Conservancy, approached Heslop-Harrison to enquire what plants were likely to be traded commercially because the CITES convention was then being drafted. It had been in the making for a number of years and was endorsed by the 1972 Stockholm United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Kew was asked to provide a list of plants for the initial meeting of CITES in Washington, DC in January 1973. One of the contentious issues at that conference was whether plants should be included at all under the Convention. It was Gren Lucas who co-ordinated the production of a document on traded plants for The Nature Conservancy to take to the meeting and fortunately plants were incorporated into the Convention. Appropriately Lucas represented Kew at the launch of the CITES convention. As a result of early participation and leadership Kew was designated as the UK Scientific Authority of CITES for plants, an activity that continues today under the leadership of Noel McGough. This has meant that Kew receives and holds many confiscated plants or finds 503 alternative non-commercial homes for them. One of the first batches to be seized was a large quantity of cyclamens entering through the port of Dover. These were eventually distributed to several National Trust gardens around the country. Today this sort of work continues, for example, the CITES unit advises the newly independent country of Georgia how to handle its export of snowdrops. Training has always been an important part of the CITES work and Kew has trained over 450 CITES enforcement officers from the UK and abroad including many customs and police officers. Gren Lucas became the chair of the Species Survival Commission of IUCN in 1980 and it set up TRAFFIC, a unit that was funded by WWF to be an independent body to work behind the scenes on trade of organisms. Its initial focus was on the trade of primates and orchids. TRAFFIC monitors the movement of wildlife and wildlife products around the world and discloses infractions when necessary. In 1979 the Foreign Office gave funds to Kew to work on the conservation of plants in the UK Dependent Territories. Heslop-Harrison also helped to stimulate the first conservation meeting with which Kew was involved. This was sponsored by NATO’s Eco-Sciences Panel and was held at Kew from 2 – 6 September 1975 on the topic ‘The function of living plant collections in conservation and in conservation oriented research and public education.’ The proceedings of this conference were published in the first of a NATO conference series on ecology (Simmons et al. 1976). The excellent conference resolutions were widely distributed. The work of Yolande Heslop-Harrison on breeding systems of plants was also a good support to the new focus on conservation brought to Kew by her husband. An important contribution to conservation at Kew was the acquisition of Wakehurst Place in Sussex in 1965. This 500 acre property already contained an important collection of trees, but also had areas of natural woodland of the Sussex Weald. This was officially dedicated as the Loder valley Reserve in 1980 when it was opened as such by Sir Giles Loder with the enthusiastic support of Tony Schilling who was head of Wakehurst at that time. Plans for nature trails and use of the reserve were worked on enthusiastically by Harry Townsend. This was put into a conservation and management plan for the reserve by John Lonsdale who was working at Wakehurst at that time. The newly named Francis Rose Reserve at Wakehurst is one of the first in the UK dedicated to the conservation of cryptogams. The Conservation mission of Wakehurst was affirmed early by the transfer of the seed physiology and seed bank there in 1973 under the leadership of Peter Thomson. Another important development for conservation under Heslop-Harrison was the establishment of a micro© The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010 504 propagation unit in 1974. This has enabled the propagation of some of the rarest plants that are in need of conservation. Conservation continues to gain momentum It is certainly true to say that conservation really became part of the daily mission of Kew under the directorship of Professor Heslop-Harrison. It has not looked back since and subsequent Directors have each increased the emphasis on conservation as the destruction of habitats and the loss of species has also increased rapidly. The earlier conservation conference was followed up under the directorship of Patrick Brenan (1976 – 1981) with an important conference on: ‘The practical role of botanic gardens in the conservation of rare and threatened plants,’ (Published as Survival or Extinction, Synge & Townsend 1979) that took place from 11 – 17 September 1978. The movers behind this conference were especially Curator, John Simmons and Ian Beyer who both wanted to increase science in the living collections and saw conservation as a way of achieving this. One of the spin-offs from this conference was the establishment in 1979 of a Botanical Gardens Conservation Co-ordinating Body. This was set up as a membership organisation for botanic gardens world-wide to assist with their conservation activities and this was initially led by Ian Beyer. The initial thrust was to prepare and circulate lists of threatened species that were cultivated in the gardens. As a result of this growing momentum in conservation some dynamic young staff with a passion for conservation were engaged by the living collections department such as Mike Fay, Andrew Jackson and Michael Maunder. The appointment of Fay reinforced the use of the micropropagation unit for conservation rather that solely for propagation. He was brought in to run a service unit for propagation, but because of his background in genetics and crop breeding he soon began to work on rare plants and their conservation and reintroduction. Fay quickly progressed his career to take on an important role in conservation genetics in the molecular section of the Jodrell Laboratory. His current work uses genetic information to make conservation decisions and is closely linked with the programmes of Natural England. Pioneer work on fingerprinting Cypripedium calceolus L. and Orchis militaris L. have been flagships of this work. Michael Maunder helped to make many connections for conservation with other organisations at home and abroad. For example this led to some collaboration with London Zoo on the conservation of Partulid snails. Maunder made many overseas contacts especially with UK overseas territories and this led to repatriation work in such places as Saint Helena. The increased focus on conservation in LCD inevitably led to some disputes about the division of financial © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010 KEW BULLETIN VOL. 65(4) resources between conservation activities and more traditional work, but the progress that has followed in both areas has shown that this has worked out well. Under the Brenan directorship the TPU grew considerably. In 1979 the Foreign Office gave funds to Kew to work on the conservation of plants in the UK Dependent Territories. At that time Sara Oldfield was appointed to the staff to oversee this activity and also to be involved in Kew’s participation in CITES. Christine Leon joined as TPC Research assistant for Europe in March 1980, Charlie Jarvis as African specialist in April 1980 and Stephen Davis as Asian specialist in September 1981. This small and active unit and the Botanic gardens Conservation Co-ordinating Body eventually evolved into an independent organisation, Botanic Gardens Conservation International, that is so active today in promoting conservation through botanic gardens. This idea originated from a botanic gardens conference held in November 1985 at Las Palmas, Canary Islands, on how botanic gardens could contribute to implementing the recently drafted World Conservation Strategy (Bramwell et al. 1986). A botanic gardens strategy was prepared by Professor Vernon Heywood and approved at this conference. In January 1986, after a meeting with IUCN in Gland, the Botanic Gardens Conservation Secretariat was set up and it began work under the directorship of Professor Heywood, on the first of January 1987 and was located at Kew. This unit eventually developed into the independent NGO, Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), which is still housed on Kew property and is now directed by Sara Oldfield. Much of its current success is due to the efforts of its first two directors Vernon Heywood and Peter Wyse-Jackson who built up this network of botanic gardens into a force for conservation and conservation education. The TPC moved from Kew to Cambridge to join an animal unit to found the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC), but it appears that plants did not keep up the same momentum there and so the work of BGCI and of Kew are ever more important. Under Kew’s directorship of Arthur Bell (1981 – 1988), orchid conservation gained momentum when the Sainsbury Orchid Conservation Project was established funded by Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury and directed by Joyce Stewart. A key to the success of this unit was the appointment of Mark Clements from Australia who brought with him the techniques for germinating orchid seed with their mycorrhizae. The orchid unit depended heavily on the micropropagation facility for its success and it was endowed by the Sainsburys in 1989. One of its several successes has been the re-establishment of Cypripedium calceolus L. in its native habitat in northern England. Also in 1989 the first full time seed collector was appointed to the Seed Bank, indicating an increased awareness of the importance of this activity. It was Roger Smith who changed the focus of the seed A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONSERVATION AT THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW bank from a more traditional seed research unit and seed collection for Kew into a seed bank for the conservation of rare species. The Millennium Seed Bank When the UK government announced that a fund would be established to celebrate the 2000 millennium and that it would include ten large ‘landmark’ projects, I and other senior management at Kew decided that Kew should try to bid for one of these. We solicited ideas from staff about what project we should put forward, and several suggestions were made from different parts of the Gardens. One proposal stood out as truly millennial and that was the suggestion from Roger Smith, the head of the small seed banking section at Wakehurst Place. His idea was vastly to expand our seed banking and seed research activities and to call it the Millennium Seed Bank. Soon, with Trustee approval, a proposal to the Millennium Commission of the lottery was drafted and the search for other funding was initiated because we knew that the lottery rules only provided half of the funding for their projects. The Millennium Seed Bank which cost £85 million to set up, owes it existence to the hard work of Giles Coode Adams who was Director of the Kew Foundation at that time and to Sir Jeffrey Bowman who was the lead trustee involved. It was their contacts and hard work that got counterpart funding from bodies such as the Welcome Trust and the Orange Company. Deputy Director John Lavin handled a lot of the administration that was needed to establish the project. The ambitious goals were soon set to collect and bank seeds of the entire British Flora by 2000 and ten percent of the world flora by 2010. The project included funds for construction of the building that now houses the seed bank and funds for both collection and research on seed banking methods and seed physiology. More on the seed bank is covered elsewhere in this symposium, but I wanted to give some details of the foundation of this important part of conservation at Kew and to acknowledge the good work of some of the people involved. The entire staff of the original seed banking section were obviously intimately involved in setting up the project. It is at this conference that we celebrate the achievement of reaching the ten percent goal of the Millennium Seed Bank. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) One of the most significant contributions to conservation through Kew has been its active participation in the CBD process. At Kew this started in 1992, the same year as the Convention was drafted, when we introduced the first benefit-sharing policy. This short document committed us to share with countries of 505 origin at least half of any benefits arising from plant screening agreements. In 1994 I asked environmental lawyer Kerry ten Kate to conduct a consultancy to review the implications for Kew of the CBD. This made it obvious that it was in our own interests to be directly involved with the CBD and the development of policies that could affect our work around the world. Accordingly a CBD officer post was created at Kew in 1996 and ten Kate filled this position. This unit continues its important work today with China Williams and Madeleine Groves. An important product from the CBD unit that I still consult frequently was the report prepared for the European Commission on the commercial use and benefit-sharing of biodiversity (ten Kate & Laird 1999). It is the work of this CBD unit, Botanical Garden Conservation International and of the scientists at Kew that enabled Kew and other similar organisations to play such an important role in the development of the 2002 Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC). This vital document is the first target-driven strategy to be developed under the CBD. Today Kew is working on several of the targets and was invited to be the facilitating organisation for target one of the GSPC which is to produce a widely accessible working list of known plant species. The 2003 conference together with Plantlife International and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee was held at Kew and led to the official UK response to the GSPC. A 2006 joint meeting at Kew followed this up to assess the progress against the targets of the GSPC. Economic Botany and Conservation Economic botany has been an emphasis at Kew since the early days when Sir Joseph Banks was assisting the Empire by moving plants around the world. There have been positive and negatives in this activity, but there is no doubt that the information, collections and expertise gained through these activities have now become important for conservation and the sustainable use of plant resources. The gradual change from enhancing the finances of an empire to using economic botany to promote sustainability is part of the history of Kew. One of the most useful tools for the change was the establishment in 1981 by Gerald Wickens of the SEPASAL data base (Survey of Economic Plants of Arid and Semi-arid Lands). This focus on arid lands eventually led to Kew’s participation in the Plants of the Northeast Programme in Brazil. This bi-national project emphasising the use of local plants for local people has done much to stimulate interest in sustainable use of the plants of northeast Brazil. It was made possible by an initial grant of a million pounds from the Weston Family Foundation. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010 506 KEW BULLETIN VOL. 65(4) This lead to many other sources of funding for the project. Conservation Overseas As conservation work increased at Kew so did the involvement of its staff abroad as mentioned above for northeastern Brazil. Some of these are listed in Table 2 and a few are mentioned below. Kew’s ability to become active in conservation in so many places was because of its long history of scientific collaboration and training with institutions all over the world. Africa had long been a focus of Kew’s scientific work and a good example of transferring this to conservation was in the 1980s through the help given to the Limbe Botanic Garden in Cameroon. The project was set up and run by Mark Bovey who relocated from Wakehurst Place to Cameroon. It involved both the restoration of the old colonial botanic garden and the conservation of the forests of Cameroon. Herbarium botanists Roger Polhill and Nigel Hepper gave much assistance to the Limbe project in its early days. More recently Martin Cheek has been much involved with the botanical inventory that led to the creation of the Kupe-Muanenguba National Park in Cameroon. John Dransfield, palm specialist from the herbarium was involved in the conservation and sustainable use of the rattans palms in Borneo. This project, in collaboration with the Commonwealth Development Corporation, has helped to prevent the over-exploitation of this valuable resource. The wood anatomy team in the Jodrell Laboratory has made its contribution with the Table 2. Some Overseas Conservation Projects of RBG Kew. Country Project Argentina Conservation education for primary school teachers Plants of the Northeast, local plants for local people Extractivism and habitat restoration in Mato Grosso State Restoration of Limbe Botanic Garden and rainforest conservation, KupeMuanenguba National Park Staff training and conservation for Trivandrum Botanic Garden Wild harvest project with National Museums of Kenya Identification of key areas for conservation using GIS Sustainable use of rattans for cane Habitat restoration and sustainable use of dry forest. Rescue and conservation of rare endemic flora Conservation work in Montserrat, British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos and other overseas territories Brazil Brazil Cameroon India Kenya Madagascar Malaysia, Sarawak Peru St Helena UK Overseas Territories © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010 work on firewood plantations in Zimbabwe and in Brazil, begun by David Cutler and continued by Peter Gasson. Michael Maunder and others were involved in a conservation programme for the Island of Saint Helena in the south Atlantic and since the arrival of Colin Clubbe this has led to a much greater involvement with other UK Overseas Territories such as the British Virgin Islands, Montserrat and other Caribbean territories. The work of the Seed Bank in the UK Overseas Territories is also contributing to their conservation efforts. The Darwin Initiative, which resulted from the Earth summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, has been a vital supporter for this overseas work. Another long-term relationship has been with the Trivandrum Botanic Garden in Kerala, India. Kew has trained many of the Trivandrum staff, many Kew staff have visited there, and this botanic garden has become a leader in conservation for southern India. The book entitled Plant Conservation in the Tropics: Perspectives and Practice (Maunder et al. 2002), brought together much of the information gathered by these overseas efforts. Madagascan conservation has been greatly stimulated by the work of Justin Moat using GIS methods to map the vegetation (Moat & Smith 2007). This bilingual work, in cooperation with twenty Malagasy and international organisations, mapped protected areas, climate, vegetation and geology. Since only 18 percent of the vegetation of Madagascar remains intact, this sort of work is vital for the conservation of the remainder. Conservation Education Undoubtedly conservation education has been one of the most important contributions of Kew to the field of conservation. Many people from many nations have studied at the Seed Bank or taken the Plant Conservation Techniques courses which began to operate in 1993 with the first nine participants. The first conservation techniques course was coordinated by Michael Maunder and since then eight more have been run with a total of 84 participants from 45 countries. Also a number of regional courses have been run in key countries. The international diploma course in Plant Conservation Strategies and Botanic Garden Education is always over-subscribed. Conservation is an integral part of the Kew Diploma in Horticulture and of all its MSc and Ph.D. programmes. These courses are helping to build conservation capacity in many parts of the world. So far 377 participants from 103 countries have participated in Kew’s training courses and the Seed bank has trained 1400 people from more than fifty countries. A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONSERVATION AT THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW Scientific Research, the Underpinning of Conservation at Kew Kew has been a major contributor to conservation mainly because of its excellence in scientific research. It is the long history of research in taxonomy, economic botany, cytology and more recently molecular genetics and systematics that has equipped the institution to provide so much of the scientific data that are essential for meaningful conservation. Without this basic research effort and all the data that it provides little could have been done. It is vital that this sort of work continues in order to underpin future work in conservation and sustainable use of plants. An indication of the link between taxonomy and conservation is that all monographs produced by Kew are now required to indicate the IUCN conservation category for all species included. Without data on the identification and distribution of species it would be impossible to assess the levels of threat to species and it is the work of the taxonomists in the herbarium that provides these types of data. The development of the CITES expertise at Kew has hinged on the science and library resources, particularly for such groups as orchids, succulents and bulbs. Several Kew staff are active members of IUCN specialist groups that assess the status of rare plants. An historic tool that is so useful to conservation is the Index Kewensis that was established from funds made available from the will of Charles Darwin. More recently this has evolved into the International Plant Names Index (IPNI, www.ipni.org). Practising Conservation at home As scientific work on conservation has increased at Kew there has also been an increasing and important emphasis of setting the example at home. This has led to such things as better conservation of resources, recycling, better composting facilities, giving up the use of peat as a growing medium, integrated pest management, waste management, solar parking meters and interpretation panels and best practise in the use of timber in the Buildings and Maintenance Department. Conservation of the wildlife of Kew and Wakehurst is now better managed. At Kew this has led to conservation programmes for butterflies, dragon flies and great crested newts. The recording and data basing of wildlife at Kew by Sandra Bell is an important example to all. The Banks building with its turf roof and heat pumps was an early example of environmental building. This project was not easy to achieve. It was initiated by Director Pat Brenan, constructed under the directorship of Arthur Bell and finally delivered early in my time as Director. This time lag indicates that constructing a pioneer building which was ahead of its time was not a simple matter. 507 Conclusions What an impressive history! Building on its long history the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is now recognised as one of the leading centres for advice and action on plant and fungal conservation. I am delighted to see the increased emphasis on conservation that is occurring under the leadership of Stephen Hopper as Director. Given the continued destruction of habitat and the loss of species there is no doubt that the fight to preserve the environment must continue and indeed accelerate. It is good that Kew is now making statements about climate change since it has the data to convince the world that greater action is needed. All conservation efforts will be in vain if we do not stabilise the climate. I urge the current staff of Kew to be active both in providing the scientific data to convince the world and in spreading the message to a wider audience through all of your educational activities. Now we have looked back at the past I hope that we will look to the future for the rest of this conference. The loss of species continues at an alarming rate and so we must now concentrate on the solutions, both scientific and political. The world faces decision time as it attempts to address the issues of climate change. All this work on conservation could be in vain of we do not rapidly do something to halt climate change that is changing habitats and causing further loss of species. Acknowledgements I am grateful for the information provided to me in interviews by Colin Clubbe, Michael Fay, Madeline Groves, John Lonsdale, Prof. Gren Lucas, Noel McGough, Sara Oldfield, and China Williams, also to Nigel Taylor, Noelia Alvarez and Jose Carlos Rodriguez for information about the living collections at Kew and to Andrew McRobb for providing me with some photographs for the conference presentation. References Aiton, W. (1789). Hortus Kewensis; or a catalogue of the Plants Cultivated in the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. George Nicol, London. ____ (1810 – 1813). Hortus Kewensis ed. 2. Longman, Hurst, Reeves, Orme & Brown, London. Bramwell, D., Hamann, O., Heywood, V. & Synge, H. (eds) (1986). Botanic Gardens and the World Conservation Strategy. Academic Press, London. IUCN Threatened Plants Committee (1977). List of rare, threatened and endemic plants in Europe. Council of Europe, European Committee for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. MAB Nature and Environment Series 14, Strasbourg. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010 508 King, R. (1976). The World of Kew. Macmillan, London. Lucas, G. & Synge, H. (eds) (1978). The IUCN Plant Red Data Book. IUCN, Morges, Switzerland. Maunder, M., Clubbe, C., Hankamer, C. & Groves, M. (2002). Plant Conservation in the Tropics: perspectives and practice. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Melville, R. (1970, 1971). Red Data Book V: Angiospermae. IUCN, Morges, loose- leaf sheets on 118 species. Moat, J. & Smith, P. (2007). Atlas of the vegetation of Madagascar. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010 View publication stats KEW BULLETIN VOL. 65(4) Simmons, J. B., Beyer, R. I., Brandham, P. E., Lucas, G. Ll. & Parry, V. T. H. (eds) (1976). Conservation of threatened plants. Plenum Press, New York & London. Synge, H. & Towsend, H. (eds) (1979). Survival or extinction. Bentham Moxon Trust, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. ten Kate, K. & Laird, S. A. (1999). The commercial use of biodiversity: access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing. Earthscan, London. Turrill, W. B. (1959). The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Past and Present. Herbert Jenkins, London.