Monocots III: Orchids
Future Plans
Collections (2006 onwards)
Both the living and herbarium collections will be enhanced over the next few years to provide a more comprehensive systematic and geographical coverage and to reflect the current research interests of the Kew team. Expeditionary work will concentrate on Madagascar, Costa Rica and SE Asia, where there are active current projects.
Baseline Plant Diversity Research (2006 onwards)
The World Orchid Checklist will continue to be updated on the web and its search facility improved based upon end-user comments. The focus of the systematic research in the Herbarium has now moved from Africa to Madagascar and SE Asia. The Orchids of Sabah will be completed to complement The Orchids of Sarawak. The Orchids of Borneo project will be completed with the publication of two more volumes.
Monographic work will continue on selected genera: Calanthe, Phragmipedium and Selenipedium will be completed by 2007.
Comparative Plant Biology (2006 onwards)
We will continue to work on the genomics, phylogenetics and pollination biology of orchids and finish the Genera Orchidacearum series as well as the anatomy of the orchids for the Anatomy of the Monocotyledons series.
Sustainable Utilisation of Plant Resources (2006 onwards)
We will continue to provide authentication support for those involved in monitoring the trade of orchids for use in different herbal preparations.
From continued participation in the Species Survival Commission, we will continue to provide advice on orchid conservation and sustainable utilisation to conservation projects, governments and international organisations e.g. CITES Secretariat.
Conservation and Environmental Monitoring (2006 onwards)
We will continue to study population genetics of UK native orchids, informing conservation management, placing British populations in their Continental context and clarifying species delimitation.
Conservation status assessments are prepared for every species in published floristic and monographic accounts.
The Micropropagation Unit will continue to grow plants for Kew’s living collections and for conservation and re-establishment projects and to further research techniques for myycorrhizal – assisted and asymbiotic germination, vegetative propagation and cryopreservation. A companion volume to Growing Orchids from Seed for hardy orchids is planned. The Micropropagation Unit will work collaboratively with the MSBP on a long-term conservation strategy for orchid seed including addressing viability questions.
Kew will seek funding to enable the establishment of a network of orchid seed banks, Orchid Seed Stores for Sustainable Use (OSSSU), which will bring together 14-20 countries in the Americas, Asia (including Australia) and Africa to work on germination and storage of 750 orchid species.
There is a need for the development of statistically rigorous methods to produce conservation assessments from limited data. Following the 2002 World Summit in Johannesburg, the Convention of Biological Diversity has called for a decrease in the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. However, a 2003 UK Royal Society report on “Measuring Biodiversity for Conservation” discussed the unavailability of satisfactory measures of biodiversity, and the difficulty of reporting accurately on the loss of biodiversity by 2010. The difficulty is not just one of measuring the rate of change of biodiversity; perhaps even more importantly, we need to obtain reliable measures of extinction risk in order to prioritise interventions that will most effectively reduce the rate of biodiversity loss. In addition, it is important to understand whether what we are collecting is representative of biodiversity. This is important given the time and money that is spent on “rapid biodiversity assessment”. Particular questions of interest are why do we discover species when we do, and whether certain morphological and ecological characters increase the probability of a species being discovered or recorded. This work focuses on the Orchidaceae and Gramineae whose distibutions are highly correlated (rs 0.973) with global generic diversity, making them an ideal test bed for such research.
Global warming is altering the timing of important developmental and behavioural events. Changes in species’ ranges and trophic relationships in response to climate warming affect their interactions. Phenological changes alter population-level interactions and community dynamics, and have profound ecosystem and evolutionary consequences. One of the more immediate effects could arise from a breakdown in evolved synchronicities, such as orchid-pollinator relationship. In order to predict future responses of species to climate change, it is important to understand how the species have responded to climate in the past. A prerequisite for studies on climate change is therefore the availability of long-term datasets, which are often scarce. With an estimated 2.5 billion specimens, biological collections have a huge potential to contribute to studies on climate change by providing us with long-term records. Understanding the effect of climate change on species ranges in space and time has been identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a top priority. The problem is to estimate the boundary of the range of the species and to test for a shift over time in this boundary (e.g. N-S, E-W). Furthermore, shifts may be studied both within and between species, such as orchid–pollinator interactions. The eventual aim is to study geographical and phenological shifts in plant-pollinator interactions using biological collection data.