Title: Achieving zero extinction for land plants
Speaker: Richard T. Corlett
Emeritus Professor, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, CAS, China & Honorary Research Fellow at Kew Royal Botanical Garden, UK
Respondent: Kwek Yan Chong
Senior Researcher at the Singapore Botanic Gardens of the National Parks Board
Summary
Despite the importance of plants for people and the threats to their future, plant conservation receives far less support than vertebrate conservation. Plants are much cheaper and easier to conserve than animals, but, although there are no technical reasons why any plant species should become extinct, inadequate funding and the shortage of skilled people has created barriers to their conservation. These barriers include the incomplete inventory, the low proportion of species with conservation status assessments, partial online data accessibility, varied data quality, and insufficient investment in both in and ex situ conservation. Machine learning, citizen science, and new technologies could mitigate some of these problems, but we need to set national and global targets of zero plant extinction to attract greater support.
About the speaker
Richard T. Corlett
Richard Corlett was born in London and studied botany at the University of Cambridge. He then did a PhD in Plant Ecology at the Australian National University, with fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. He subsequently lived and worked in the East Asian tropics for 40 years, first at Chiang Mai University (1980-82), then NUS (1982-87, 2008-2012), HKU (1988-2008), and XTBG (2012-2021).
His research focused on ecology and conservation in tropical East Asia, and the impacts of climate change. In addition to numerous scientific papers, he has written several books, including The Ecology of Tropical East Asia (Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2019). He was a lead author for the 2013 IPCC climate change report and the IPBES Regional Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for the Asia-Pacific. He now lives back in London, but is still an emeritus professor at XTBG and an honorary research fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
About the respondent
Kwek Yan Chong
Kwek is a Senior Researcher at the Singapore Botanic Gardens of the National Parks Board, where he coordinates a Tropical Forest Ecology Research Programme anchored by a Long-Term Forest Ecological Monitoring project that maintains a network of permanent forest plots in Singapore’s nature reserves and parks. His research interests are in vegetation ecology, urban ecology, and invasion ecology.
Related paper
Title: We need to accelerate the digitization of existing botanical information and complete the global plant inventory
Author: Richard Corlett
Abstract:
The availability of a global checklist of known land plants makes it possible to bring together all botanical information and make it accessible online. Two obstacles remain, however. First, most existing information is not yet digitized. Second, an estimated 10%？25% more species are still undescribed and therefore invisible to science.
About the series
The Integrative Conservation Webinar Series are monthly events featuring cutting-edge presentations and topical discussions on the theory, practice, and policy of biodiversity conservation. The series is sponsored by Integrative Conservation (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/27709329) and the webinars’ content is generally related to work published in the journal. The Integrative Conservation webinars take place the last Tuesday of every month (4:30 to 6 pm, Beijing time), on Zoom (freely accessible to anyone, ID: 312 430 8960, PWD: 666666), and are embedded within the weekly seminar series of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG).
