Written by Cassandra Nichols, CEO, BGANZ
There could hardly have been a more fitting location for the 15th Australasian Plant Conservation Conference than Port Douglas, on the doorstep of one of Australia’s most remarkable and hard-fought-for landscapes.
Held under the theme Plant Conservation: Culture, Collaboration and Change, the conference brought together researchers, conservation practitioners, Traditional Owners, land managers, government, community organisations and others working to protect our native flora.
Dr Rosemary Hill opened the conference by reflecting on five decades of efforts to protect the Daintree lowlands. It was an extraordinary reminder of just how important community action and protest were in changing the future of the Daintree. The now famous Daintree Blockade of the 1980s brought national and international attention to the threats facing the rainforest, but the story of its conservation has continued to evolve over many decades.
One of the fascinating parts of that story was that the full biological significance of some areas was not necessarily understood when the land was first subdivided. As people began living on the land, surveying it and documenting what was actually there, a much richer picture of its biodiversity emerged.
That knowledge allowed different solutions to be explored, including approaches that enabled blocks with particularly high conservation value to be protected while directing settlement towards land with lower biodiversity values. It was a great example of conservation having to work not just with ecology, but with people, property, planning and politics.
But perhaps the bigger lesson was that saving a place like the Daintree cannot be achieved at one scale alone. Local action matters enormously, but threats such as climate change do not recognise the boundaries of a national park, a council area or even a country. Conservation increasingly requires action across communities, organisations and multiple levels of government.
Despite the scale of those challenges, the opening keynote also carried an unexpectedly optimistic message: human systems are capable of changing remarkably quickly. The fall of the Berlin Wall was offered as an example. Something that had appeared fixed could suddenly change and with it, people’s expectations of what was possible.
That idea, both the urgency of conservation and the possibility of change, continued throughout the conference.
Image: Conference delegates. Credit: Cassandra Nichols
Keeping knowledge alive
One of the standout sessions for me explored work being led by Traditional Owners and Indigenous communities from Australia, the Torres Strait and Papua New Guinea.
Senior Ethnobotanist and Mbabaram Traditional Custodian Gerry Turpin shared a line that captured the importance of this work particularly powerfully:
“When an old man dies, it’s like a library burning.”
Gerry leads the work of the Tropical Indigenous Ethnobotany Centre (TIEC) at the Australian Tropical Herbarium. Its work recognises that enormous amounts of traditional plant knowledge have already been lost and that recording knowledge is only one part of the response.
TIEC works with Traditional Owners to document and research cultural plant knowledge while supporting Indigenous decision-making, protecting Indigenous intellectual and cultural property, strengthening the transfer of knowledge to younger generations and ensuring information is returned to communities. Importantly, its approach starts with building trust and supporting Traditional Owners to determine how their knowledge is managed and shared.
For botanic gardens, there is a great deal to reflect on here. Our collections and scientific records hold enormous knowledge about plants, but they sit alongside knowledge systems that have understood, used and cared for those plants for thousands of years. Finding better ways to recognise, respect and work with that knowledge is an important part of the future of plant conservation.
Image: Cairns Botanic Garden tour. Credit: Emma Simpkins
Australia’s extraordinary and vulnerable flora
Professor Rachael Gallagher’s plenary also brought the scale of the challenge into sharp focus.
Australia is exceptional globally for the uniqueness of its flora: around 88% of Australian plant species occur nowhere else on Earth. Yet protection remains uneven. Research has found that only 29% of Australian plant species meet a representation target of having at least 30% of their geographic range within protected areas. Meaning there is still a lot of work ahead of us.
Her presentation was also an important reminder of what plant conservation is ultimately trying to achieve – plants need viable populations in the wild. It is there that populations continue to reproduce, interact with other species and, importantly, evolve in response to changing environmental pressures, whether climate change, disease or other threats.
Seed banking and other forms of ex situ conservation are enormously important. They provide insurance against loss and retain plant material that may become critical to future recovery efforts. But, as Rachael emphasised, the seed bank cannot be the end point. The challenge now is improving our ability to establish and maintain populations back in the landscape. That means restoration, translocation and rewilding are increasingly important parts of the conservation toolkit. Ex situ conservation buys us time and safeguards diversity; the ultimate goal remains healthy, viable and evolving populations in situ.
Image: Cairns Botanic Garden tour. Credit: Emma Simpkins
The power of a network
We also heard about the Queensland Threatened Plant Network (QTPN) and the value of connecting the many people and organisations already working on threatened plant recovery.
The numbers make the need clear. Queensland has more than 14,000 native plant and plant-like species, and 794 plants are listed as threatened; around 74% of all threatened species in the state. The QTPN is designed to connect those working on threatened plant recovery, strengthen partnerships and support a more coordinated approach across Queensland. Its work includes threatened flora surveys, recovery planning, training and collaborative conservation projects.
For BGANZ, this idea of networks was particularly resonant. No individual garden, research institution, government agency or community organisation can address plant extinction alone. Networks allow expertise to be shared, gaps to be identified, partnerships to form and conservation activity to extend well beyond the boundaries of any single organisation. That was perhaps my strongest takeaway from Port Douglas.
We need seed banks, living collections and scientific research. We need restoration and recovery in the landscape. We need Traditional Knowledge and Western science. We need local communities, practitioners, governments and researchers. And we need the connections between all of them.
The conference demonstrated the extraordinary depth of expertise already working across plant conservation. The challenge, and the opportunity, is to connect that expertise even more effectively and turn knowledge into action. Because if the story of the Daintree tells us anything, it is that conservation outcomes are not predetermined. People can change systems, knowledge can change decisions, and collaboration can change what is possible.
Thank you to Plant Conservation Australia (PCA) and the organising committee for hosting and running this inspiring event.
