Botanic Gardens in Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainability: History, Contemporary Engagements, Decolonization Challenges, and Renewed Potential
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Botanic gardens are increasingly important agents of plant research and conservation. A large number of botanic gardens have been established throughout the globe since the mid-20th century to pursue new socio-environmental missions. Others, with histories that span centuries, have also undergone a deep transformation in the context of growing attention to matters of sustainability. Bridging key aspects of the scholarly literature on the genesis of the botanical garden institution in Europe and its legacy, this article presents the re-invention of these gardens as institutions of conservation, sustainability, and social engagement as they renew their relevance in the contemporary world. This article proceeds by covering three focal points. First, it summarizes the scholarly literature on the emergence of botanical gardens in Europe and their association with the rise of modern science, the nation-state, colonialism, and empire-building. Second, it presents accounts of current scientific and biodiversity conservation endeavours as reflexive engagements with these historical legacies, decolonization initiatives, and new socio-environmental missions. Third, this article points beyond its focus on the historical transformation of the European botanical garden institution, by identifying a more widely encompassing body of scholarship that puts forth frameworks for understanding the current role of botanic gardens on a global scale.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".