Kew to do a ‘health check’ of world’s plants

SCIENTISTS at Kew Gardens are launching an annual “health check” of the world’s plants to examine issues including wildlife loss, disease and invasive species.

Plans for the “state of the world’s plants” assessment, which will see its first results published in December, have been announced by the Royal Botanical Gardens (RBG), Kew, as part of its new science strategy.

Kew will also be putting all the information it holds about the world’s known plant species online by 2020, working to identify the most species-rich but threatened tropical forests in the world and collecting and preserving 15% of the world’s wild plant species by the end of the decade.

RBG Kew is also starting a new masters course to train students in taxonomy, the science of classifying biological organisms, and holding a children’s plant science festival as part of its new strategy.

The strategy will also continue to focus on useful plants and fungi, with projects including helping the Ethiopian government develop a climate-resilient coffee industry, and examining the chemistry of plants to search for naturally occurring pesticides.

Professor Kathy Willis, director of science at RBG Kew said: “With this strategy we are focusing Kew’s science in those areas where we can truly make a unique impact on people’s lives, thanks to our unrivalled collection of specimens and the world-leading expertise of our evolutionary botanists, mycologists, taxonomists and systematists. Our core purpose at Kew stems from a simple but often overlooked truth: that all of our lives depend on plants and fungi.”