BBG President Scot Medbury recently attended an international conference in Tbilisi, Georgia aimed at helping the Tbilisi Botanical Garden develop a conservation strategy to save some of the country's most threatened plants. One of the conference sponsors was the London-based Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), an alliance of 500 gardens around the world that works to establish conservation measures in countries where native plant life is disappearing. BGCI secretary general Sara Oldfield noted that "The flora of the Caucasus is phenomenally diverse and incredibly beautiful, but is increasingly endangered for a variety of reasons."
In an interview with Garden Design Online, BBG's Medbury said some threats to plant diversity in Georgia include the following:
- Timber harvesting below the timber-line zones in the Caucasus. "A lot of trees are being cut legally or otherwise and being exported to Turkey," he said, "and as with timber harvesting in other parts of the temperate world ... there are severe impacts on not widely distributed rare herbacious plants."
- Road building in timber regions is threatening meadow environments and plant species like peonies and orchids. He said scientists at the conference reported that "in one region of the Caucasus, 40 percent of the ecosystems above timber line have been vulnerable to degradation and 40 percent have been lost with a consequent loss of species diversity."
- Over-grazing due to timing. Mebury explained that if sheep are grazed in early spring, some of the earliest spring ephemeral plants are lost due to root compaction, or the animals eat the tiny seedlings, and over time, it means a severe loss of plant population.
- The spread of invasive plants (like the North American Black Locust) that choke out native species.
Medbury said the Caucasus is "one of the bio-diversity hot spots in the world" that has an amazing number of species that are worth preserving, both in the mountains and also in western Georgia, which he said is a refuge of plants from earlier geological periods.
Medbury hopes to establish a permanent partnership between the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Tbilisi Botantical Garden, which was a royal garden as early as 1630, known for its plant introductions, and which was established officially as a botanical garden in 1845. It has a herbarium with one million plant specimens, an enormous library, and a sizeable staff. He said the garden needs help with things like information technology, sharing plant databases, and field work, and he hopes that's where BBG, BGCI, and perhaps even the US government can be of help.
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