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Editor's Picks

Group photo at The Savill Garden
Three-day event included visits to two parks in Berkshire...
Roderick Cameron | Aug 18, 2024
Rebekah Mohn presenting at IBC 2024
Several abstracts included research involving Quercus.
Website Editor | Aug 13, 2024
Participants at the Oak Study Day in Arboretum des Pouyouleix
This five-day event included visits to four oak collections...
Website Editor | Aug 12, 2024

Plant Focus

Quercus dumosa acorn
Animals, plants, and fungi depend on this humble tree, but its future—and theirs—is all but certain.

Oak Conservation and Research Grants

Categories

Habitat restoration: The practice of renewing or restoring degraded habitats and ecosystems to support oak regeneration through interventions such as canopy thinning, removing invasive plant species, excluding non-native herbivores, and modifying fire regimens.

Ex-situ conservation: Protecting a species outside of its natural habitat and/or range by maintaining genetically diverse and representative collections, either in botanic garden and arboretum living collections, in cryopreservation, or in tissue culture. Since oaks are “exceptional species” their acorns cannot be seed banked through conventional methods, so these other types of ex-situ collections are critically important conservation tools.

Field survey and population monitoring: Conducting observational studies in the wild to correctly identify species and to determine if a species is present or absent in its historic or predicted range; evaluating size, health, growth, phenology, hybridization, seed production, age-class distribution, and other characteristics of populations; identifying threats to populations.

Education: Providing training, teaching, outreach, and public engagement to raise awareness of the importance of oaks and solutions to the threatening factors that are driving them to extinction.

Population reintroduction and reinforcement: The purposeful, strategic, and scientifically informed planting of threatened species into the wild in their historic or future predicted range to maintain or increase genetic diversity and ensure future resiliency and adaptive capacity of the species.