Time: 4:30- 6:00 pm (Beijing time)

Date: 28 Mar 2023 (Tue)

Venue: Zoom ID: 312 430 8960, PWD: 666666

Speaker

Richard T. Corlett

Emeritus Professor

Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, CAS, China & Honorary Research Fellow at Kew Royal Botanical Garden, UK.

Summary

Despite the importance of plants for people and the threats to their future, plant conservation receives far less support than vertebrate conservation. Plants are much cheaper and easier to conserve than animals, but, although there are no technical reasons why any plant species should become extinct, inadequate funding and the shortage of skilled people has created barriers to their conservation. These barriers include the incomplete inventory, the low proportion of species with conservation status assessments, partial online data accessibility, varied data quality, and insufficient investment in both in and ex situ conservation. Machine learning, citizen science, and new technologies could mitigate some of these problems, but we need to set national and global targets of zero plant extinction to attract greater support.

About the speaker

Richard Corlett was born in London and studied botany at the University of Cambridge. He then did a PhD in Plant Ecology at the Australian National University, with fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. He subsequently lived and worked in the East Asian tropics for 40 years, first at Chiang Mai University (1980-82), then NUS (1982-87, 2008-2012), HKU (1988-2008), and XTBG (2012-2021). His research focused on ecology and conservation in tropical East Asia, and the impacts of climate change. In addition to numerous scientific papers, he has written several books, including The Ecology of Tropical East Asia (Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2019). He was a lead author for the 2013 IPCC climate change report and the IPBES Regional Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for the Asia-Pacific. He now lives back in London, but is still an emeritus professor at XTBG and an honorary research fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

About the series

The Integrative Conservation Webinar Series are monthly events featuring cutting-edge presentations and topical discussions on the theory, practice, and policy of biodiversity conservation. The series is sponsored by Integrative Conservation (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/27709329) and the webinars’ content is generally related to work published in the journal. The Integrative Conservation webinars take place the last Tuesday of every month (4:30 to 6 pm, Beijing time), on Zoom (freely accessible to anyone, ID: 312 430 8960, PWD: 666666), and are embedded within the weekly seminar series of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG).