Ex situ conservation, the protection of plants outside of their native habitats, is an important goal of the Chicago Botanic Garden. The Garden’s
ex situ program primarily employs three strategies—seed banking, tissue culture and genetic analysis of endangered plants.
Seed banking, which involves storing frozen seed, provides a genetic "safety net" in case plants disappear in the wild.
Tissue culture is the propagation, under controlled laboratory conditions, of rare and endangered plants that are difficult to propagate from seed or whose seed does not store well.
Genetic analysis of rare species through various techniques, including, Microsatellites, Sequencing, AFLP (Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism and ISSR (inter-simple sequence repeats), is helping guide preservation and restoration activities.
Currently there are two ongoing ex situ conservation projects:
Seeds of Success - The Seeds of Success project at the Chicago Botanic Garden is an extension of the global seed conservation initiative - the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) project. Coordinated by the Seed Conservation Department at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the mandate of the MSB is to collect and store seed from 10% of the indigenous flora of the world by 2010, with an emphasis on dryland species. The Chicago Botanic Garden has entered into an agreement with Kew to collect seed from 1,500 native plant species over the next five years. The Garden’s focus is the preservation of the flora of the tallgrass prairie – an endangered habitat of which less than 0.01% of its former extent remains. Seed from one population of each targeted species will be collected from high quality native prairie remnants from Illinois and its surrounding states. Collections will only be made from large populations and no more than 20% of the viable seed available on a given day will be collected. No threatened or endangered species have been targeted for collection for this project. The collected seeds will be available for research as well as stored for conservation efforts. There is also research underway in conjunction with this project to study population genetics and restoration success. The Seeds of Success program was initiated at the CBG in the spring of 2003 with plans to collect seed through 2008.
We are in the process of developing a web-based interactive plant checklist. The searchable database, once completed, will include information on the species assigned to the Garden for collection. It will provide a medium for the public to contact the Seed Bank Coordinator with information on population locations as well as a system for participants to mark species they would be interested in collecting and sending to Kew on behalf of the CBG.
Chicago Center for Endangered Plants - In 1996, The Garden was accepted into the Center for Plant Conservation (CPC). The Center is a national consortium of 30 botanical gardens and arboreta dedicated to the preservation of rare native plants. The consortium collects, grows and maintains the National Collection of Endangered Plants. Each member garden is responsible for the ex situ conservation of rare plant species from its region.
In 1997, the Chicago Botanic Garden and The Morton Arboretum, both participating institutions with the Center for Plant Conservation, partnered to create the Chicago Center for Endangered Plants. This collaboration draws on the mutual expertise and resources of the two institutions, greatly advancing endangered plant research in the Midwest. The two institutions work together on the ex situ conservation of nine globally rare taxa (listed below) for the Center, as well as other conservation projects.
Center for Plant Conservation Taxa
Agalinis skinneriana (pale false foxglove)
Asclepias meadii (Mead’s milkweed)
Aster furcatus (forked aster)
Chrysosplenium iowense (golden saxifrage)
Echinodorus parvulus (small burhead)
Lespedeza leptostachya (prairie bush clover)
Platanthera leucophaea (Eastern prairie white fringed orchid)
Polemonium occidentale var. lacustre (a rare variety of Jacob’s ladder)
Scirpus hallii (Hall’s bulrush)
One of the primary goals of any ex situ conservation program is the reintroduction of individual plants back into natural habitats. The Garden partners with The Morton Arboretum to reintroduce Cirsium pitcheri (Pitcher’s thistle), a federally listed threatened plant, to appropriate habitats within Illinois Beach State Park. This sand dune-loving thistle was lost from Illinois in the early 1900s. The project, now nearly 10 years old, restored this species to the Illinois lakeshore.
