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To help raise awareness of the plight currently facing the world’s tree species, the GTC organised a suite of tree conservation talks on Tree Tuesday of BGCI’s Sixth Global Botanic Garden Congress to place threatened trees firmly in the limelight. Here Yvette Harvey-Brown reports on the major discussion points of Tree Tuesday.
BGCI’s Sixth Global Botanic Garden Congress (6GBGC) was hosted by the Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques de la Ville de Genève, Switzerland, from the 26th-30th of June 2017. It brought together over 500 delegates from a variety of institutions including botanic gardens, non-governmental organisations (NGO’s), trusts and foundations, universities and government organisations. Talks and roundtable discussions were organised throughout the day to highlight not only GTC achievements but also the conservation challenge ahead, and to emphasise that only through working together in partnership can we achieve GTC’s goal of preventing all tree species extinctions in the wild.
Tree Tuesday was kicked off by an inspiring plenary talk from Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Professor at the University of Minnesota in Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour, about the importance of tree species and the essential role of that botanic gardens play in their conservation. For example by holding threatened tree species in their ex situ collections and using these collections for implementing recovery and restoration programmes. Jeannine also highlighted the essential role that individual tree species play in ecosystems, and thus why tree species diversity needs to be conserved.
