Format: ORAL

Jeremie Fant (1,2), Zoe Diaz Martin(1,3), Nora Gavin-Smyth(1,2), Kay Havens(1,2)

1) Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, Illinois, USA 2) Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA 3) Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Historically, ex situ plant conservation has focused on seed banking, however, up to one-third of threatened flowering plant do not produce seeds or produce seeds that cannot be dried and frozen for storage. As a result, these exceptional species must be conserved in living plant collections. This practice of maintaining small, isolated populations often leads to inbreeding, loss of genetic diversity, hybridization between species, and in general, poor conservation outcomes, creating challenges for ensuring their long-term genetic diversity and viability/ An important method used in the zoo community is a pedigree-based management approach, where founding individuals are genotyped and recorded in a studbook. This allows genetic lineages to be tracked and prevents the breeding of closely related individuals. Optimal breeding pairs are identified and crossed (typically via sperm transfer) to maximize the genetic health of the captive population across institutions. This approach greatly improves conservation outcomes by safeguarding genetic diversity ex situ, creating robust captive populations, and improving reintroduction efforts. By emulating the pedigree approach and creating greater collaboration between institutions, the botanic garden community would be better equipped to safeguard the viability of threatened species in their collections and together manage all ex situ individuals as a meta collection.