Tropical botanical gardens play an under-emphasized role in animal conservation

Abstract

Botanical gardens hold a large potential for biodiversity conservation (Ashton, 1988), a topic which has been on international agendas (Maunder, 1994; Wyse Jackson and Sutherland, 2000) for decades. Tropical botanical gardens (TBGs) in particular hold unutilized conservation potential, as they are usually located in hotspots of biodiversity that undergo rapid degradation (Chen et al., 2009). However, by nature, the emphasis of botanical gardens—and researchers who use botanical gardens as their study sites—lies on ex situ and in situ conservation of plants (Hurka, 1994; Chen et al., 2009; Donaldson, 2009; Cibrian-Jaramillo et al., 2013). In addition, the role of botanical gardens in environmental education and raising conservation awareness has received substantial interest (e.g., Suh and Samways, 2001; He and Chen, 2012). However, despite the notion that botanical gardens play a role in the conservation of habitat remnants (Pinheiro et al., 2006), the role of botanical gardens for conservation of fauna goes largely unaddressed. Here, I highlight the potential that TBGs hold for animal conservation by providing a case study and pointing out questions we might address on this topic. Ideally