x (COVID-19 Cancelled) x Improving plant conservation in Botanic Gardens: Extending zoo approaches to rare, exceptional plant species 2020
Genetic Lab

Genetics, Plant Breeding, Labwork

This project directly addresses an increasingly critical need in the botanic garden conservation community: how to manage living-collections of threatened plants across multiple institutions to maintain maximum genetic diversity and demographic viability over the long-term. This is critically important if these collections are to support reintroduction efforts in the future. The zoo community achieves this by using studbooks that track the origin and source of all individuals to make scientifically-informed breeding and curation decisions. A student will be using genetic fingerprinting techniques to measure the relatedness of all the Amorphophallus titanum (Corpse Flower) individuals currently held in collections. This species has one of the largest flowers in the plant kingdom and is a favorite species of Botanic Gardens. We are hoping to use the genetic information, to track all individuals to 1 of 20 possible expeditions that collected plants from Sumarta, Indonesia in the past 130 years. 

 

 

Intern(s)