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Expanding the role of botanical gardens in the future of food

Nature Plants volume 1, Article number: 15078 (2015) Cite this article

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Consistent with their historical focus on the functional utility of plants, botanical gardens have an important opportunity to help ensure global food and ecosystem security by expanding their living collections, research and education programmes to emphasize agriculture and its impacts.

Botanical gardens are living repositories of plant biodiversity that maintain documented collections of plants for display, education, conservation and research. Collectively, the world's more than 3,000 botanical gardens cultivate approximately one-third of known plant species. Many botanical gardens conduct research, contributing valuable information on plant identification, geographic distributions, morphology, reproduction and traditional uses. Furthermore, each year botanical gardens worldwide attract over 250 million visitors who come to gardens in order to experience and learn about plants5. Thus, botanical gardens are uniquely situated to advance knowledge of food plants and the impacts of their cultivation, and to help promote an understanding of the relationship between plants, agriculture and the environment.

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Figure 1: The global network of botanical gardens.
Figure 2: Ranked abundance of taxa maintained by global botanic gardens and agricultural taxa utilized for human consumption.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, 63103, Missouri, USA

    A. J. Miller

  2. Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, 63110, Missouri, USA

    A. J. Miller, P. Raven & P. Wyse Jackson

  3. United States Botanic Garden, 20024, Washington DC, USA

    A. Novy

  4. Botany Department, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, 20560, Washington DC, USA

    A. Novy

  5. United States Agency for International Development, 20004, Washington DC, USA

    J. Glover

  6. Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, St. Louis, 63132, Missouri, USA

    E. A. Kellogg

  7. United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory, Beltsville, 20705, Maryland, USA

    J. E. Maul

  8. Department of Biology, Washington University, St. Louis, 63130, Missouri, USA

    P. Wyse Jackson

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  1. A. J. Miller
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  2. A. Novy
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  3. J. Glover
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  4. E. A. Kellogg
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  5. J. E. Maul
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  6. P. Raven
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  7. P. Wyse Jackson
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Correspondence to A. J. Miller or A. Novy.

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Miller, A., Novy, A., Glover, J. et al. Expanding the role of botanical gardens in the future of food. Nature Plants 1, 15078 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2015.78

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