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The collections policy of the Finnish Museum of Natural History Luomus is hierarchically structured. The general collections policy defines the overall principles and guidelines. The sub-collections policies, such as the Living collections policy, comply with and apply the general collections policy and specify its guidelines and instructions, taking the special nature of the sub-collections into account. The living plant collections policy guides the care of the collections in the botanic gardens and the seed bank, excluding DNA and tissue samples which are covered by a separate genomic resources policy. The purpose of the collections policy is to help guide the care of the garden collections and the processing of information relating to the collections, thereby providing the basis for developing the botanic gardens.

The collections policy of the Finnish Museum of Natural History Luomus is hierarchically structured. The general collections policy defines the overall principles and guidelines. The sub-collections policies, such as the Living collections policy, comply with and apply the general collections policy and specify its guidelines and instructions, taking the special nature of the sub-collections into account. The living plant collections policy guides the care of the collections in the botanic gardens and the seed bank, excluding DNA and tissue samples which are covered by a separate genomic resources policy. The purpose of the collections policy is to help guide the care of the garden collections and the processing of information relating to the collections, thereby providing the basis for developing the botanic gardens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Botanical gardens and arboretums can be potential sources of dispersal for alien plant species, which in turn can become naturalized and eventually invasive. Th rough their superior competitive ability, these fugitive species pose serious threat to the native flora by displacing native species. Th us, the monitoring of potentially invasive species is a must, in order to detect their dispersal early. If a species had already escaped cultivation, a quick response including the prevention of further spread is essential. In this study, 12 live plant collections in Transdanubia, Hungary were surveyed for potentially invasive woody plants. Th e aim was to identify those species which started to spread already and thus represent a risk of escape from botanical gardens and arboretums. In average, 4 potentially invasive woody species were encountered in one living plant collection. Th ere was one arboretum with 13 such species, and 4 collections were free from those. Caucasian walnut (Pterocarya fr axinifolia) turned up in most collections as potentially invasive: its spread was experienced in 5 collections. It was followed by greenwax golden bamboo (Phyllostachys viridiglaucescens), Kentucky coff ee tree (Gymnocladus dioica), black walnut (Juglans nigra) and paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera) with three occurrences each. Honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) was found to spread the farthest with seedlings appearing even in 40 m distance from the mother plant, while broadleaf bamboo (Sasa palmata) reached the largest ground cover around mother plants via effective vegetative spread. Based on the experiences during this research, it would be important to create a risk analysis in living plant collections to monitor potentially invasive species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From immemorial time, botanical gardens have played a preponderant role in the conservation of plant species, especially those of economic interest to man. The Botanical Garden of Pinar del Río has not been left out of it and as an institution managing the sustainable use of its taxa, it harbours 160 arboreal species, which are grouped into 124 genera and 51 families. The best represented families are Fabaceae, Myrtaceae, Meliaceae, Sapindaceae, Boraginaceae, Combretaceae and Malvaceae. Regarding their potentialities, it has been verified that they are all wood, 58 % medicinal, 29 % edible, 16 % ornamental and 11 % mellifluous. As for endemism, 27 species are endemic, representing 17 % of the total. In turn, 21 species have been categorized as endangered, representing 13 %, 33 % of them are categorized as preliminarily endangered, 52 % as critically endangered, 9 % as endangered and 4 % as vulnerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (MNHN) in Paris holds ca. 70 million specimens. The collections were in need of a strategy to ensure their long-term conservation. We discuss how the Department of Botanical and Zoological Gardens (DJBZ; tropical living collections), and the Department of Systematics and Evolution (DSE; herbarium) contribute to achieving GSPC's Target 1 ('a widely accessible working list of known plant species as a step towards a complete world flora'). The DJBZ started encouraging better management of the collections, evolving towards focused reference collections, where all specimens have well-documented collection data. The objective is to link all collections to a scientific referee. This has already been achieved for a number of taxa. The herbarium of the DSE (acronym P) is among the world's largest (11 million specimens, including 400,000 types). The collection's heterogeneity impedes access to its data, since P is a mix of recent well-documented collections and historical collections at various curational levels. P is currently under renovation, which started by mounting all ca. 2 million unmounted specimens. The project also includes databasing and imaging of every specimen. The database now holds around 1,000,000 records. For taxonomic studies, living collections are crucial, especially for plants that are not easily preserved as herbarium specimens. Living collections also enable studies impossible to forecast at the time of collecting. Herbaria and living collections should therefore be conceived as interoperable entities requiring common scientific curation. Through a combination of its assets and the expertise of its researchers, the MNHN is well prepared to tackle the new objectives of the GSPC beyond 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]