Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about the non-departmental public body. For the botanical gardens in Kew, south-west London, see Kew Gardens.

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Budget
£65.6 million[1]
Employees
1,100
Websitewww.kew.org

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. An internationally important botanical research and education institution, it employs 1,100 staff.[1] Its board of trustees is chaired by Dame Amelia Fawcett.

The organisation manages

conifers.[3] In 1994, the Castle Howard Arboretum Trust, which runs the Yorkshire Arboretum, was formed as a partnership between Kew and the Castle Howard Estate.[4]

In 2019, the organisation had 2,316,699 public visitors at Kew, and 312,813 at Wakehurst.

UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003.[6] The collections at Kew and Wakehurst include over 27,000 taxa of living plants,[7] 8.3 million plant and fungal herbarium specimens, and over 40,000 species in the seed bank.[8]

Mission

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew states that its mission is to apply scientific discovery and research to fully develop the information about and potential uses of plants and fungi.[9]

A conference held in 1976 by the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew was important as it established a co-ordinating body in order to determine which threatened plants are in cultivation and where they are located which played a role in plant conservation.[10]

Governance

Kew is governed by a board of trustees which comprises a chairman and eleven members. Ten members and the chairman are appointed by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. His Majesty the King appoints his own trustee on the recommendation of the Secretary of State.

As of 2023 the Board members are:[11]

Kew Science

Scientific staff

More than 470 scientists work for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.[12] The Director of Science is Alexandre Antonelli. The Deputy Directors are Elizabeth Gardner, Paul Kersey and Monique Simmonds.[13]

Kew Science staff include those of the Kew Madagascar Conservation Centre.[14]

Databases

The scientific staff at Kew maintain a variety of plant and fungal data and digital resources, including:[15]

Plants of the World Online

Main article: Plants of the World Online

Plants of the World Online is an online database launched in March 2017 as one of nine strategic outputs with the ultimate aim being "to enable users to access information on all the world's known

seed-bearing plants by 2020". It links taxonomic data with images from the collection, to provide a single point of access with information on identification, distribution, traits, conservation, molecular phylogenies and uses. In addition it serves as a backbone for global resources such as World Flora Online.[16]

International Plant Names Index

Main article: International Plant Names Index

The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) includes information from the

GBIF).[18]

Neotropikey

Information and key to

Neotropics (tropical South and Central America).[19]

World Checklist of Selected Plant Families

Main article: World Checklist of Selected Plant Families

The World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (WCSP) is a register of accepted scientific names and synonyms of 200 selected seed plant families. WCSP is widely used, and most authoritative web resources on plants use it as their basis.[18][20]

World Checklist of Vascular Plants

The World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) includes all known

firmosses). It is derived from the WCSP and the IPNI and therefore only includes names found in those databases. It is the taxonomic database for Plants of the World Online. Since WCSP includes only selected families, WCVP will seek to complete the process.[21][18]

World Checklist of Useful Plant Species

A checklist of 40,292 species, including nine non-plant taxa (e.g.

forkweed, brown algae), compiled from multiple pre-existing datasets.[22]

Collaborative projects

The Plant List

Main article: The Plant List

Kew also cooperated with the

Internet encyclopedia project which was launched in 2010 to compile a comprehensive list of botanical nomenclature.[23] The Plant List has 1,064,035 scientific plant names of species rank of which 350,699 are accepted species names. In addition, the list has 642 plant families and 17,020 plant genera. It was last updated in 2013, and was superseded by World Flora Online.[24][25]

World Flora Online

Main article: World Flora Online

World Flora Online was developed as a successor to The Plant List, in 2012, aiming to include all known plants by 2020.[24]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Annual reports 2020.
  2. ^ "How we work". Millennium Seed Bank. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Retrieved 26 August 2017.
  3. ^ England, Forestry Commission. "History of Bedgebury National Pinetum". www.forestry.gov.uk. Archived from the original on 16 August 2018. Retrieved 15 August 2018.
  4. ^ "Background". The Yorkshire Arboretum. Retrieved 15 August 2018.
  5. ^ "ALVA – Association of Leading Visitor Attractions". www.alva.org.uk. Retrieved 23 October 2020.
  6. ISBN 978-1-904994-57-2
    .
  7. ^ "Living Collections at Kew". kew.org.
  8. ^ "Science collections at Kew". kew.org.
  9. ^ RBG mission 2020.
  10. S2CID 42245259
    .
  11. ^ "Board of Trustees". Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Retrieved 19 September 2023.
  12. ^ "Kew Science". Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Retrieved 19 September 2023.
  13. ^ "Science". London: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Retrieved 19 September 2023.
  14. ^ "UK and Islands – Madagascar". Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
  15. ^ RBG data 2020.
  16. ^ POWO 2020.
  17. ^ Jackson 1893, Hooker JD. Preface, in.
  18. ^ a b c Turner & Govaerts 2019.
  19. ^ Neotropikey 2020.
  20. ^ WCSP 2020.
  21. ^ WCVP 2020.
  22. ^ WCUPS 2020.
  23. ^ Paton 2013.
  24. ^ a b WFO 2020.
  25. ^ The Plant List 2013.

Sources

External links

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