April 1998: Issue 13

Welcome to the April 1998 edition of Kew Scientist on the Internet. If you wish to be included on the mailing list for the printed version please contact Dr Geoff Kite

Features in this issue:

Director's Message: Kew in the New Millennium

Many people, organisations and governments are preparing to celebrate the new millennium. At Kew we have been planning our future in the next millennium for several years. We have raised over £46.2 m towards the £80 m Millennium Seed Bank, a Millennium Commission landmark project designed to celebrate the year 2000. The Bank will store a near-complete representation of UK native seed-bearing plants by 2000 and hold seed from an additional 25,000 species worldwide by 2010. I would like to thank all the project sponsors for their support, particularly for the grants worth £30 m from the Millennium Commission, £9.2 m from The Wellcome Trust and £2.5 m from Orange. Construction of the Bank will begin this spring and it will be called the Wellcome Trust Millennium Building to reflect the support of The Wellcome Trust, a major independent medical research charity that recognises the importance of plants in medicine and the need to conserve them.

Other projects also improve the infrastructure for our research into the next century. We have a new policy on access under the CBD, and the new Lower Nursery complex and the Herbarium Wing D extension improve facilities for our collections. The £2.4 m renovation of Museum No.1, financed partly by the National Heritage Memorial Fund of the National Lottery, the Weston Family and the Wolfson Foundation, provides a major plant science education centre for the next millennium and a public exhibition, 'Plants+People', of our Economic Botany Collections.

Part of our vision for Kew in the next millennium, Kew 2020, is to make our scientific information and research accessible globally. To do this, we must computerise the information in our collections and use the Internet to help disseminate it, particularly to source countries. We have begun projects to computerise details of our Herbarium and other preserved collections (e.g. reference microscope slides) and we recently received a generous grant from The Charles Wolfson Charitable Trust to begin a three year project to develop the Survey of Economic Plants for Arid and Semi-Arid Lands as a Web database. Two essential sources of information listing the genera of flowering plants and the authors of plant names are already available at our Web site. We are working hard to ensure that all our computer systems and programs holding this valuable information are year 2000 compliant

The global community looks to Kew on matters relating to plant systematics and, increasingly, conservation as well. The infrastructural developments being undertaken now at Kew will ensure that we are able to meet these expectations well into the next millennium.

Contact Prof. Sir Ghillean T. Prance, Director

Email: Ghillean Prance

Kew Scientist

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 3AB.

Tel: 0181 332 5000 Fax: 0181 332 5310

Editor: Prof Mike Bennett

Production Editor: Dr Geoff Kite

Editorial Advisory Team:

Herbarium: Dr P. Cribb, D. Field, Dr N. Hind, P. Boyce, N. McGough, Dr A. Paton

Jodrell Laboratory: Prof M. Bennett, Dr P. Rudall, Dr G. Kite, Dr R. Probert

Living Collections: M. Maunder, Dr M. Fay, A. Jackson, M. Sinnott, J. Lonsdale

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