Abstract
The contribution of the European Native Seed Conservation Network (ENSCONET, 2004-2009) and the ENSCONET Consortium (since 2010) towards meeting the 2020 Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) target 8 was assessed in 2017. While the outcome was positive (62.7% of European threatened species already conserved ex situ in seed banks), the analysis showed that it was essential to provide guidance on which European native threatened species should be collected as a priority if the target was to be reached by 2020. In this paper we present a priority-setting method and its result, designed to guide collecting strategies across Europe to meet the 2020 GSPC target 8. The result of our study is a country-based checklist of European threatened taxa to be collected and stored ex situ across the seed banks of the ENSCONET Consortium by 2020. After discussing the results of the applied method, the ENSCONET Consortium Steering Committee has identified some key action points to support the implementation of such a collecting strategy across Europe in order to meet the 2020 GSPC target 8 for Europe.
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Notes
CR: Critically Endangered; EN: Endangered; VU: Vulnerable.
For the purpose of this study, Europe is defined as countries west of the Ural and north of the African- and Near East-Mediterranean coast. We therefore included countries such as Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Turkey.
Not all the listed taxa produce seeds and thus might require other methods of ex situ conservation (e.g. Artemisia pancicii which is currently tested for tissue culture in Austria).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all ENSCOBASE data providers. We are especially grateful to Alexander Antonakakis and Nicolas Boretos for the ongoing maintenance of the ENSCOBASE server at the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania (MAICh), Crete, Greece. We are very grateful to Eckhard von Raab-Straube (Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin-Dahlem, Germany) for providing us with the latest version of the Euro+Med taxonomic data. Finally, we thank Alberto L. Teixido (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil) and one anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Communicated by David Hawksworth.
This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Ex-situ conservation.
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Rivière, S., Breman, E., Kiehn, M. et al. How to meet the 2020 GSPC target 8 in Europe: priority-setting for seed banking of native threatened plants. Biodivers Conserv 27, 1873–1890 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-018-1513-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-018-1513-2