Void Countersignature with airSlate SignNow

Void countersignature

so now i'd like to give the floor um to max reigns max has been involved with animals and plants since he was a child and has been collecting plants in his own garden since the age of 10. um yeah after an international career he became director of the botanic garden of bonn in 2011 and president of the association of botanic gardens in 2016 and he specialized in urdu casey and in lowercase max the floor is yours for about 20 minutes okay hello everyone i'll try to keep to the time um i have prepared i have been asked to give a keynote on um documentation record keeping and i will try to share some of my thoughts with you i haven't participated in earlier meetings so probably i'm just telling you what you already know but you know it's always good to give a talk but everybody agrees we don't have any conflict brewing maybe i've got some some ideas which are novel or not universally accepted towards the end of my talk i'll try to share my screen with you now here we are so my talk is entitled accumulation versus collection documentation makes a difference and i'm going to first discuss what we are actually dealing with when we document the collection what's the whole idea what is a botanical garden now this is a kind of a botanical garden our colleagues from hanover might disagree that is harrenhausen which has a part which is a botanical garden but much of it is actually a largely ornamental plantings and the obvious question to ask is why is this not a botanical garden and how is that distinguished from a botanical garden now this is a botanical garden at least i sincerely hope so since i've been director of this particular botanical garden for the last nine years now where's the difference one difference is um and one crucial difference is documentation and we'll come to a definition a little bit later this is a picture from florence botanical garden you can see all the potted cycles here and some trees here and if you look at the labels here the label of a coke oak then you can see that they've got numbers and that of course refers to the fact that there is some kind of data associated with that plant and as we all know the standards expected from plant documentation have been gradually increasing uh that is something that i'm trying to visualize with these labels representing four different time layers in our botanical garden starting off with people being perfectly content with having a name on a plant without wanting to know where it's from to having a number on it but really only a number in a sense of a catalogue number like uh vali would have used it in the 19th century to coming increasing increasingly towards a coded numbering as you can see that on the right hand side and an increasingly extensive documentation of course it's a different question whether that's only in the database or that's also on the label but the key message is that our requirements for documentation have gradually increased and that of course has a whole range of different reasons um one of the reasons is that not that botanical gardens have an extensive role for instance in teaching and outreach and these are just some pictures from outreach and teaching elements from a range of different botanical gardens here in in brazil in germany in italy um where you can see that obviously that is also a defining feature for technical gardens that we communicate science to students which we then call teaching or to the population in general which we then call outreach or education and of course the generally accepted definition of a botanic garden as contrasted with a public garden or a park is that peter weiss jackson formulated that in the following virginia gardens are institutions holding documented collections of living plants for the purposes of scientific research conservation display and education and in the following few slides i would like to make a direct connection between the first half and the second half of this sentence between the documentation and the purposes if the plants in botanical gardens have specific purposes which may be overlapping then we could claim that there are five generally five plant families in any botanical gardens and those are the tgac the research ac the display ac the education and the conservacy so those are plants which perform a specific role in one or two of these fields everything else doesn't actually play a prominent role in a botanical garden in the strict sense of the word and actually i grade out the display i see because displays are not a defining feature of botanical gardens unless the other unlike the other four groups and the obvious question is if this these are the four or five plant groups that we have in botanical gardens which specific reasons do we have for documenting them why should they document it and how should they be documented that is which data would we like to store i think the question is fairly easily answered in the case of the conservacy the plans that we keep for maintaining them in our gardens for purposes of conservation here we are forced to ensure that they survive in the gardens because they can't in nature for whatever reason but in order to actually meaningfully preserve them we have to make sure that we actually maintain not only the species but that we turn maintain some semblance of the genetic makeup of that species in our excito collections if you look at the on the left hand side you can see a distribution map of arnica montana a quite important medicinal plant in germany and you can see that it's got population clusters scattered over the entire country larger ones in the east smaller ones in the west and of course if you want to preserve the population its genetic the populations in their genetic diversity then you actually have to make sure that you preserve those different sub-populations in different places and botanical garden for instance has a program conserving particularly this tiny subcluster of populations close to bond city so we're conservat conserving a marginal population of a widespread species we have to conserve the local ecotype everything else wouldn't make any sense and that of course requires a detailed documentation in order to know that it's actually material from that sub-population and not from the one on the other side of the rhine or uh down in the starland uh so here i think it's it's fairly obvious if you look at the exceedto conservation website of botanical garden the german association of botanical gardens then you can see that all the populations conserved in the network are all documented with a code and with detailed locality information what we're essentially dealing with here is a kind of chain of custody so we have we want to have complete traceability of the accessions why well if we're talking about endangered species we have to document that we legally obtain them because they're usually protected under state law or national law if we want to reintroduce from our excited collections into the wild and we are introduced from the wrong sub-population we may actually contribute to genetic erosion rather than reducing genetic erosion which is the main aim of reintroduction into the world and um of course if we don't know what exactly we're having we can't verify whether we are successfully preserving genetic diversity even wears and that sometimes happens that for simple reasons of ease excito collections are propagated vegetatively which entirely beats the objective because then you start cloning the plants and you lose all genetic diversity so exeter conservation i think it's immediately obvious requires comprehensive documentation and extended record keeping what about science um and we'll start with something very trivial urtica da yawica few of you have them in their gardens at least not voluntarily probably it's one of the most common agricultural and roadside weeds you can possibly have in western and central europe actually going right into china so really widespread if you look on the right hand side you can see that they've got this species has got a whole range of different eco types or more food types so they look quite different and if you start doing phytochemistry you will also find that from that species complex urtica dioica you get dramatically different chemical profiles now what does that mean that means that analyzing ertiga dioica and not documented documenting which specifical accession which specifically individual you analyzed gives you scientific data which you can publish but which nobody will ever be able to reproduce because the profile that you obtain from your given clone may not be present in any other clone anywhere in the vast distribution area of that species if you can't falsify a scientific result it's no longer science it's that simple so you have to record you have to have traceability and that's why i use the unusual term chain of custody here in addition here having a name in urtica diary even an infraspecific name is essentially null and void because the infraspecific taxonomy is completely confused yeah so you so there's no other way apart from direct documentation of the accession to verify that you are able to reproduce scientific results and compare them to those of others the same thing goes of course for molecular data this is a phylogeny truncated phylogeny of urtica dioica and its allies here you've got exactly the same problem they often look very similar the misidentifications in herbaria and collections are bound so unless you can go back to the original material in some way and the most obvious way of having a fully documented accession you will not be able to reproduce even phylogenetic data for a given question you may want to address the obvious question to ask is how good are gardens uh in that respect so if i want to have only fully documented material um and i want to go to botanical gardens to use that for my research or conservation then it would be good to know so what's the percentage of well-documented material in botanical gardens and we more or less accidentally do the study of that on the genus gorillas we wanted to do a corilis a hazelnut phylogeny and requested material from botanical gardens and we got their data and it turns out that um if you look at german botanical gardens where and neighboring countries then we got repo reports of 219 accessions of corilis of ellana a hundred of them were native common corollars of ilana and 191 were undocumented which means 88 percent of the gorillas of elana of the corellis in botanical gardens and those of that answered is essentially useless for a scientific study at least if you want to do a comparative scientific study because you would never know whether the material you get from hamburg is the same clone as the one from mains and where it originally came from came from so only 12 percent uh actually um make that litmus test that is only twelve percent of the gorillas uh species the uh genus that's present in just about all temperate gardens uh are actually useful in that strict strict sense of the word because they are sufficiently documented so what does that mean documentation for collection use and research research results are not fully reproducible if documentation is incomplete the same or different genotypes may be present in different collections we know a lot of clones abound in collections phylogeny or phytochemical screening may be unpredictably biased by multiple samples of the same genetic individual from different collections the representativeness of the data is unclear because we can't correlate that to distribution and populations and maybe most importantly nowadays the legality of the research is unclear because nowadays you have to be able to prove exactly where your material come came from in order to be sure that you were allowed to do the type of research you actually carried out and that goes back to the convention on biological diversity backfiring on science via the nagoya protocol i think most of you will be familiar with it most countries represented here by in this congress have countersigned the nagoya protocol and it essentially what it means is in order to be allowed to do any study on the genetic or biochemical and or biochemical composition of a genetic resource you first have to verify when and where exactly was the material sourced so where was the access done and when and secondly um where where and when and and secondly which additional rules may apply so you actually need that information otherwise you can't simply go ahead and do your research actually you can do your research but you can't publish it subsequently and in many countries you actually liable for legal prosecution if you do in germany certainly you are so one fairly nifty way of dealing with this problem is of course ipin international plant exchange network i think most of you know that it standardizes plant records records and the transfer of information it regulates access and exchange and also transfer of material to ipan and non-ipin member and has abs provisions so the source of the germplasm via ipin remains traceable we are back to the chain of custody and it characterizes the legal framework which the resource is under yeah just a reminder i'm sure you've talked about that before now what type of information has to be retained this is one of my favorite examples here material brought into gardens and that's relevant to both conservation and science is nearly never representative of a species or even a population and this is just an example here from crook farm i think all of you know this fantastic nursery in in wales and they they spell out where their material is from and characterize it and then that they are of course the rare exception usually if you get commercial material you may even be told where it's from but you won't get any qualifying information and here you can see those are three representatives of kotlia sp carter all given fantasy names by by bledin and sue and coded with the code number and then you get a source area now if you lose that source area the material immediately loses its value but you can also see that here for instance in this single catalog from the same darjeeling area you get different eco-types or more foot types of the same form reducing them to a species name and giving them a number would of course be a major fallacy so what we need in order to make science science we need this chain of custody we need a direct connection between on the one hand all the coded codified information are usually transferred via an accession number we need it to be linked to specific time and date and possibly person of collection and then we can tie the succession to all the scientific data we generate to the genomic dna to chemical profiles to sequence data and to all images and observational data we may have here on the left hand side and of course that accession ideally always or nearly always corresponds here to for instance a seed collection or a seed sample ideally that seed sample comes accompanied with a voucher for verification it may be impossible to make a determination of the seed but once you've got got the plant growing or you collect the living plant then you can make a voucher why would you want to have a herbarium voucher with a plant collection well in many cases that's superfluous but not necessarily think of the many plants we have in our collections which change under our uh under our care one common example in german botanical gardens i think the only commonly found species of equilibrius aquilegia vulgaris and i think in hardly any virginia garden are you going to find the wild type because it constantly bastardizes with closely allied either species or cultivars of the same species so if you want to trace if you want to be able to verify if the species that you've got growing in your garden still is the species that you introduced maybe 20 or 30 years ago you have to anchor that accession in some way and of course the classical way of doing that is by vouchering it in a herbarium specimen which you can then compare to the collection that you still have growing so herbero specimens and increasingly genomic dna are important to track sorry the process of domestication that may take place here one of my favorite examples ak ofra on the right hand side that's what you find commonly in botanical collections in botanical gardens i call it the garden type it was introduced into german or european botanical gardens about 150 years ago and looks like the pictures on the right hand side the wild type here on the left looks completely different what has happened is simply that in the course of 140 years of growing in gardens it has been completely domesticated so i think i convinced you that we need this documentation and all the records for science and we need it for conservation now what's with display ac the plans that we have for showing and of course if you look at the tulips at koikenhove you may not want to accession them into your database because come june most of them are thrown into the onto the compost heap and there's little point in accessioning the new bulbs each year on the other hand some plants primarily used for display may be par an integral part of the collection may maybe a actually an emblematic part of the collection like those chilean honey palms here in pisa botanical garden and very often these then have some kind of educational significance um this is an example from our virginia garden here in bonn university so these taxodium these bald cypress are historically relevant and we are fortunate that we know who actually collected them for whom they were collected they're part of our garden history and um so that information is doesn't give them any conservation value because there's lots of bald cypress in south carolina still standing so they won't come back to us for seeds but they've got a conversation value that's not a spelling mistake actually so that is an educational value that these plans have but they only have that because we have the historical information attached so um coming yes three more minutes yeah coming back to our scheme i think that's what we can claim all these plans um all these plant groups require their documentation um [Music] and i think you can read at your leisure what's standing here so there's a lot of added value and legal requirements involved so how does a record keeping tie in with collection quality record keeping of course first and foremost documents collection scope and size and records taxonomic identity and taxonomic and phytogenetic diversity and of course this has to match the garden mission it defines conservation value scientific value documentation of the legal framework work which ties into scientific and conservation value conversation value and horticultural quality which i didn't talk about very much whereas horticultural merit stays a little bit out of scope here conversely what are the particular challenges i already mentioned that hybridization in gardens is a major challenge and if you grow for instance pulmonary or collegiate together you can't actually it's very difficult to keep track of what you're dealing with what you have in your collection and a dramatical problem are out crossing trees we've got for instance carrier two carrier species here standing by side by side but there wouldn't be any point in sowing the seeds because all of them are going to be hybrids and i do not know how to reflect that anywhere an accession should in theory be a subset of the genetic phenotypic diversity of a wild population here you can see the highly divergent seedlings of wild collected rus seed but as a matter of fact we usually or very often do clonal propagation and accessions may then represent single genotypes um here an example from our garden we brought areogonum overlappolium into the cultivation you're the three you see three different clones and now we are propagating them with cuttings i've got no idea whether these cuttings represent all three genotypes or whether we've only got cuttings of the most vigorous one growing on the lower right so we're losing if we if we don't take care of that and don't keep track of that we're losing the genetic diversity of that accession and that may mean that we end up with single clones and if we are unlucky in dioecius plants we'll end up with a single gender okay so um that brings me to a whole range of challenges in record keeping and i'll just briefly go through them how can record keeping help with mission match so with what we actually want to do with a collection how can we optimize conversation value so that's the educational value and use record keeping for that i mentioned the historical perspective how can we optimize conservation value and that includes questions such as how to track genetic diversity and how to track genetic integrity excluding hybridization how can we increase scientific value very much the same questions how can we facilitate timely and complete transfer of the record data that's a major challenge as all of us know it's very difficult to obtain the data from different gardens very often and very important and increasingly important how can we increase legal certainty for our collections using the tools at our disposal with record keeping and with these questions i'm hopefully on time and i'm definitely finished thanks a lot i would like to ask alexandra hey travis children are joining i would like like to ask alexandra to join your most uh interesting idea yeah hello everybody so we had a little technical problems because i wasn't allowed to share the gem board and i had to send the link via email to christina and uh it was about five minutes until we could start and we introduced each other so um we didn't discuss as long on the questions but we found that uh especially for the first point that there is a collection policy is especially important and we um discussed about documenting the genetic diversity in the collections and how important it would be to have a garden herbarium but for my um garden it's um it's too small the herbarium is too small it's too much effort to do it also okay yeah so you had the technical problems first and then you took the time to actually get to know each other and uh yeah and you had a bit of time to discuss what you wanted to yes but we had uh the keynote speaker joined our session so um the discussion was very interesting great thank you uh for sharing um i'd like to ask room number two with allison hi yes um well i enjoyed trying to use every single color of post-it notes to start no it's um we we did man i did manage to share my screen um and um we had quite a long chat about the um we were talking a lot about the cons conversation value of um of plants because that's um a lot of the um the people in our group we felt that um probably the higher percentage of plants in our um in our gardens were going to be a conversation value as opposed to conservation value um we struggled a little bit because of the uh because the the questions were so wide-ranging and fundamental it it felt like sort of solving every single thing about botanic gardens in 10 minutes but it was it was nice to see everyone a nice fail to chat and technically it seemed to work seemed to work pretty well yeah yeah great thank you so let's keep on the conversation ask room number three author what would you like to add to what has been said already so yeah um yeah we could um we could share maybe i wrote in a different yeah there uh no we were talking a little bit about these things but as um as alison said quite big questions right so um in the beginning i forgot to to type everything down that we were thinking of but then you reminded me someone in the organization board and we got some stuff down in the end there um talking about how good record keeping could actually help you see get a lot of data out of your data so to say if you want to do something if you're celebrating a big anniversary for your garden for example see how many trees are of a certain age or you could report back to your board to see if you have a lot of wild collected specimens and so on and we also talked quite a bit about how to commune communicate with the scientific community uh about the collections yeah and how would you do that we were talking a little bit about um what kind of tools the scientific community uses for data and gibberiff came up and it was quite easy to upload your data from from iris to gibbet and how that can improve your data used in science thank you um yeah so now that we still have a bit of time about um three minutes for other facilitators um to share something if they feel that they have something burning they would really like to share with all of us um be quick unmute yourself and take your chance sure matt's here in customer group 10 uh we we just started by by saying that often the display is the main focus of many botanic gardens in arboretum we think so so it is a challenge to sort of backtrack what we have but in many cases data do exist and if we just connect with each other the accessions even if they're not valuable for research and conservation in in their own right they they would be in in a global connect context like i mean we are a meta collection so so i think and there rules like iris can definitely help in in creating that that community meta collections and also just we've also noted that it's very rare that you have a good herbarium in botanic gardens uh if they're not from the start part of a university garden and but even just sampling the collection for for well leaves are what well just small samples to be able to to make the dna studies could help in this context if you see it as a meta collection yeah that's about it thank you is there anyone who'd like to react on that max i see you i just one very brief comment i mean it's absolutely impossible to systematically vouch a botanical garden and we certainly we've also got some 10 000 species that's absolutely inconceivable but what we do as a matter of course is that anything is used in a scientific study anybody send samples for a specific scientific study that is the moment when a voucher ends up in our institutional herbarium so so that we can trace the sample that was sent out back to something that sits in our permanent collection uh it's we don't have the ambition of vouchering everything that's in the garden certainly not but in a tandem i think that's quite quite sensible thank you max um we have time for one more person feeding work one more comment who is the one um just unmute yourself because i can't see you the same abby i see your hand i i think our uh main takeaway from our conversation is really the importance of of having so many people on board from horticulturalist to the people that are collecting your data and really how do we develop kind of that group effort of getting the best data for our collections