ABSTRACT
During its 233 years of glorious journey, CSIR-NBRI botanic garden has been carrying out several programs on ex situ and in situ conservation of plants. The conservation actions include collection of threatened plants from the wild, standardization of their propagation protocols through seeds, macro/micro-vegetative propagation methods, and multiplication in large number for distribution to different botanic gardens of universities, institutions, and colleges for ex situ conservation. The garden also provides planting materials to state forest departments for in situ conservation of these threatened plants. The state forest departments plant these threatened species in different agroclimatic regions/locations in protected areas and reserved forests for in situ conservation, identified through ecological niche modeling for achieving improved survival. The garden has different houses that conserve thousands of important species collected from different parts of India and abroad. CSIR-NBRI has established a field germplasm bank of threatened plants at its Banthra field station. The plant collections of the garden also include many threatened and taxonomically important plants from different countries, e.g., Welwitschia mirabilis Hook.f. (= W. bainesii (Hook.f.) Carr.) and Microcycas calocoma (Miq.) A.DC. Currently, CSIR-NBRI leads a pan-India CSIR program on conservation of 500 threatened plants of the country following a tested 10-point conservation protocol. CSIR-NBRI also maintains a web portal on Threatened plants of India. In addition to its conservation of threatened plants program, other contributions of botanic gardens, such as ecosystem services, conservation education, recreation function, and R&D activities in floriculture, have been discussed in this paper.
