June 16 Conservation Talk

with Mike DeMotta

Join us for an in-person conservation talk on Wednesday, June 16 from 11am-1pm at Keoki’s Paradise in Poipu. See some of the island’s most secluded and stunning wild places as our Curator of Living Collections, Mike DeMotta, shares stories and images from the field.

NTBG Members who attend will receive a coupon for a free appetizer or desert.

Registration Required for the Conservation Talk: (808) 742-7534

conservation talk
Mike DeMotta in the field

Conservation at NTBG

Our conservation initiatives include collecting expeditions throughout Hawai’i and the Pacific region to identify plant species that are at risk of extinction and to collect seeds and plant material for propagation and conservation in the living collections. Other projects focus on ecological restoration of degraded habitats, protecting the endemic species that still exist, and reintroducing species which have not survived on their own.

While the challenges of protecting endemic species are enormous, the NTBG is also very concerned about preserving culturally important plant species. Many of these are cultivars that were developed over thousands of years by indigenous people living on the islands of Oceania. Scholars are only now beginning to understand the importance and value of many of these ethnobotanical plants, some of which may even hold promise for solving global crises such as world hunger and disease.

Protecting ethnobotanical plants and endemic plants call for very different strategies. Preservation of ethnobotanical plants requires a thorough understanding that can only be achieved through in-depth surveys of the indigenous people who are knowledgeable about the plants and who are willing to help botanists identify and collect them. Once identified and collected, the plants can be grown in ex situ collections, which serve as germplasm repositories that can be drawn on in the event these cultivars are lost in their native countries. NTBG has several important conservation collections of ethnobotanical species and cultivars, some of which include the world’s largest collection of breadfruit and smaller collections of taro, banana, coconut, and sugar cane.

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