Collections and conservation

Kew has well over seven million herbarium specimens, which are widely recognised as an important reference collection for plant taxonomy and identification. Additionally these collections significantly contribute to conservation work undertaken at Kew. Here, we highlight how herbarium records feed into evidence-based conservation decisions illustrated through the Tropical Important Plant Areas (TIPAs) programme, one of Kew’s Strategic Science Outputs for 2020.  

What are TIPAs?

Certain parts of the world are home to greater plant diversity than others, and, like most natural resources, are under threat from land-use change, climate change and degradation. In the race against species extinction it is important to identify areas that exhibit exceptional plant diversity to prioritise conservation efforts.

This urgent task has led to the Important Plant Areas (IPAs) designation created by Plantlife International which identifies these areas with the following three criteria: threatened species, threatened habitats and exceptional botanical richness. This year the criteria were revised to include socio-economic and culturally important plants to engage with communities, in order to contribute to the long-term sustainability and conservation of these plants.

Since the inception of IPAs in the early 2000s great progress has been made in identifying areas of importance for plants: so far 69 countries have undertaken an initial assessment of their IPAs (Plantlife, 2010). However, as seen from Figure 1, there has been a gap in identifying IPAs in the tropics which led to the launch of Kew’s Tropical Important Plant Areas initiative. 

Kew and Plantlife are now working with IPA partners from across the globe to adapt the IPA criteria to the conservation challenges and the data limitations we face beyond Europe, so that we can effectively identify areas including threatened species and habitats in the tropics.

In the first phase of this work, we are focussing on seven countries across the tropics where we have strong existing partnerships and robust data sets: Bolivia, Cameroon, Guinea, Indonesian New Guinea, Mozambique, Uganda and the Caribbean Overseas Territories.

The final output will be to enable national and local authorities to effectively target conservation efforts by designating priority conservation areas.

Currently one in four European IPAs holds no legal protection or active management plan (Plantlife, 2010) and so the greatest challenge after identifying IPAs will be to ensure legal protection. This will be dependent on local networks and national legislation, furthering the importance of working with in-country partners and governments in the early stages of the programme. 

The use of the information held in collections is an essential starting point to determine what the rarest species and their habitats are; where they are known to occur and are likely to occur; and also where the gaps in our knowledge of a country’s flora lie, so that we can target fieldwork efficiently (Romeiras et al., 2014; Greve et al., 2015).

We are databasing collections from herbaria with significant Mozambique collections. These herbaria include Kew, the Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical in Lisbon (LISC), National Herbarium of Zimbabwe in Harare (SRGH) and the herbaria of IIAM and the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, Mozambique.

Primarily we record plant locality, date, habitat and traits which feed into the TIPAs criteria. This methodology was developed through the IUCN Sampled Red List Index (SRLI) for Plants, a project led by Kew and the Natural History Museum, London. The scientists involved used collections-based research to assess a randomly selected sample of the world’s plants in order to create a picture of the overall threat status for each major plant group (Brummit & Bachman 2010).

Once the species data are collated and georeferenced we can make preliminary Red List assessments. By working with the IUCN SSC Southern Africa Plant Specialist Group and with botanists who have undertaken fieldwork in the region, we are in a position to assess threats to the species, and assign an IUCN Red List threat assessment to the species.

A previous study by River et al. (2011) demonstrated that using 15 herbarium specimens can confidently provide a preliminary conservation assessment, demonstrating this as a robust scientific methodology.

Collaborating for conservation

From the valuable data collated from herbarium collections, we can further efforts in under-collected areas, collaborate on multi-disciplinary research and prioritise conservation research.

The revised IPA criteria have been aligned with the IUCN’s Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs), a designation with overarching criteria applied to all species and biomes to simplify conservation planning for decision-makers. The outputs of TIPAs will contribute to Red List assessments for endemic and range-restricted plants, highlight threatened habitats and areas of plant diversity, but also feed into wider initiatives such as landscape-scale conservation.

Acknowledgements

Much of Kew’s research in Mozambique is funded through the Darwin Initiative, Bentham-Moxon Trust, CEPF and other invaluable funders.