Can a Botanic Garden Metacollection Better Conserve Wild Plant Diversity? A Case Study Comparing Pooled Collections with an Ideal Sampling Model

Premise of research. To safeguard threatened plant species, best-practice guidelines and genetic modeling emphasize that ex situ collections should be composed of high numbers of maternal lines. Threatened species often present challenges to meeting this standard due to biology or logistics. An approach that pools garden collections into a single larger metacollection may be more effective at capturing genetic diversity. This study examines the genetic capture of a metacollection and compares this with an idealized model for ex situ sampling.Methodology. The model species, Pseudophoenix ekmanii (cacheo palm), was chosen for its threat status, presence in collections, and reproductive limitations. In total, 171 in situ plants were compared with 91 ex situ plants via 10 microsatellite markers. Three cohorts representing both legacy (older) collections and a deliberately structured (recent) conservation collection were pooled and compared. Bootstrapped resampling of these ex situ cohorts was compared with re...