Dr. S.C.Rai, Mayor, Lucknow, Dr. Peter Wyse Jackson and other invited delegates from various parts of India. Through the HSBC funded Investing in Nature partnership, BGCI is supporting plant conservation throughout its worldwide network of botanic gardens, he informed. “IIN-India is fully an in country programme in which we will be developing our own scientific strategy for strengthening ex-situ conservation of plant diversity in our botanic gardens, which has been agreed upon in the implementation strategy of Convention on Biological Diversity”, he said.

Fig.2. Drs. Mark Richardson and P. Pushpangadan at a session in first NCBGI.

Dr. Peter Wyse Jackson, Secretary General, BGCI gave a very informative keynote address wherein he spoke about the Investing in Nature program in detail. He informed delegates that between 60,000 to 100,000 plant species were threatened worldwide and there was an urgent need for an action plan for India to prevent the loss of plant diversity of the country. He also explained the genesis and major elements of the International Agenda for Botanic Garden Conservation and the Global and Strategy Plant Conservation (GSPC) the measurable targets of GSPC, particularly the target 8 on “ex-situ conservation”.

The conference was organized in twelve interactive sessions in which brief presentations were made on different themes and programmes relevant to Indian botanic gardens today. The topics of the sessions included:

Indian Botanic Garden Network:

As an important part of the IIN-India programme, the development of a network of Indian botanic gardens was discussed and a proposal for an Indian Botanic gardens Network has been prepared and is being sent with this Newsletter.It was agreed that the network must effectively represent the breadth of India's gardens, both geographically and administratively, and that a greater collaboration and sharing of resources among the botanic gardens in India must be encouraged.

Fig.3. Dr. S. Kumar demonstrating the database to the participants, Mrs. V. Gupta & Mrs. S. Ahuja also seen at database session.

Databases for Indian Botanic Gardens:

Dr. S. Kumar demonstrated the prototype of the Indian Botanic Gardens Collections database, Network database and Plants of India database in both multiuser and web enabled versions.

He also demonstrated the ILDIS legume database and explained the difficulty in getting authenticated data. He informed the 4 products- Database website,CD, Hard copy. He explained that this authentic list could be used for documenting leguminous plants of botanic garden. More information regarding the database will appear in future Newsletters.