Plant Conservation

Plants are essential to life on earth. Plants provide a wide range of essential ecosystem services. Importantly, they are also of immense cultural and spiritual value to our species. Plant conservation has changed in one fundamental way over the last decade. The stakes are higher and so the risks of failure are extraordinarily high. Human activity is directly eroding the world’s ecological foundations with plants a key asset for society. The rates of plant extinction are not slowing. In this chapter we broadly review many facets of plant conservation and discuss the current state and future outlook of the topic.