Ex situ Plant Conservation and Beyond

In recent years, the mission of many botanic gardens and arboreta has expanded from a traditional focus on developing a horticultural collection to one that includes taking a proactive role in plant conservation. To use their limited resources more effectively, many gardens are seeking ways to quantify their contributions to, conservation efforts, both as a self-assessment tool to improve their effectiveness and as a way to give an explicit accounting of activities to donors and funding agencies. We suggest many ways gardens can measure the success of their conservation programs, and present results from a survey conducted to assess current conservation activities at botanic gardens.