Global Strategy for Plant Conservation

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Global Strategy for Plant Conservation Target 1
Progress and Prospects
Eimear Nic Lughadha Head of Science Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew
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Floras
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Monographs
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Nature 346 August 1990
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Nature 346 August 1990 IOPI Delphi October 1990
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• World Checklist of Myrtaceae

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• plant families
• 102,000 accepted species
• - Bibliographic details
• - Synonyms
• - Distribution data

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c. 1,000,000 names at species level
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Estimated global totals of known vascular plant
species

• Year Author No. of species
• (estimated)
• 1974 Stebbins 231,413
• 1992 May 270,000
• 2000 Prance et al. 320,000
• 2001 Govaerts 422,127
• Bramwell 421,968
• Scotland Wortley 223,300

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• World Checklist and
• Bibliography of
• Fagales
• 1998

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Global Strategy for Plant Conservation

• Understanding and documenting plant diversity
• Conserving plant diversity
• Using plant diversity sustainably
• Promoting education awareness about plant
  diversity
• Capacity building for plant diversity

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Global Strategy for Plant Conservation

• Kew played key role in negotiation and supporting
  documentation
• Target 1 A widely accessible working list of all
  known plant species
• Facilitating Organisation for Stakeholder
  Consultation

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Committing to Checklists
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GSPC TARGET 1 PROGRESS

• Kew with collaborators have contributed 80 of
  total to date
• 114 collaborators in 20 different countries

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• Specialist compilers not family specialists
• Optimising use of specialists time for review
• Perfect should not be the enemy of the good

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Reaching the Target
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Reaching the Target

• New Checklists
• Documenting and refining methodology
• Improving compilation tools
• Developing prototype
• Identifying user needs in detail
• Articulating potential impact of checklists
• Standardising source datasets IPNI-Tropicos

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• Compositae and Melastomataceae
• Involving more contributors
• Tackling the maintenance challenge
• Diversifying uptake and use
• Completing the virtuous circle

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Why Checklists Matter

• their use and impact

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How many names are there?

• 0.35 million flowering plants
• 1.5 million scientific plant names published
• 3 million names incl. common misspellings

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Impact 1 Very difficult to find information
Information about one plant may be published
under many names
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Costus or Kut RootSaussurea costus (Falc.)
Lipschitz
Example

• Root widely used in Chinese traditional medicine
• family Asteraceae
• many synonyms
• few synonyms cited in Chinese pharmacopoeia
• most frequent name in herbal literature is
  Aucklandia lappa Decne.

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Example Search Google for Saussurea costus
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Searching with Accepted name
51 PubMed Records
215 GenBank Records
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Searching witha synonym
03 PubMed Records
14 GenBank Records
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Lessons

• Using a scientific name does not guarantee the
  reliability of the information
• Rarely find all published information with 1 name
• within a single information source (e.g. NCBI)
• especially when searching multiple sources
• You may have to work hard to find all synonyms

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Authoritative checklist
answer questions such as Q1 What is the
correct name? Q2 How many plants in this
genus? Q3 Are these names synonymous? Q4
List all synonyms for this plant?
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Who uses checklists?

• GenBank / GBIF / Barcode of Life
• WHO / EMEA
• FAO / USDA /
• Development Agencies - ICRAF / CIFOR
• IUCN Red Lists / WCMC /
• CITES
• Publishers Biological abstracts Phytochemical
  dictionaries

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How to measure impact?

• Take one example GenBank
• Relevance to BarCode of Life

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Searching NCBI the possible outcomes today
Only 7 outcomes from 40 return ALL data and avoid
errors
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Searching NCBIwith an authoritative names index
Outcome more complete or more accurate
Conclusion 33 of the possible 40 outcomes would
be more complete or more reliable
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Species representation in GenBank15 spp 84
records
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Public interest in plants far broader queries
made of EPIC
700,000 queries refer to 14,500 genera
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Comparison of names in NCBI with Kew Checklist
system (106 families)
16,000 names currently in NCBI 1.5 million names
exist in IPNI
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Maintenance burden

• Currently c. 10,000 changes to plant names occur
  / year
• new species published (2K)
• names placed in synonymy (4K)
• species move genus name change (4K)

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