UBC Botanical Garden are research partners or contributors to the following international and national initiatives:
Canadensys
UBC Botanical Garden and UBC Centre for Plant Research are institutional partners in the Canada-wide Canadensys project. Dr. Sean Graham is a member of the Canadensys steering committee. The mission of Canadensys is to unlock the specimen information held by Canadian university-based biological collections and share this via a network of distributed databases, compatible with other biodiversity information networks like the Canadian Biodiversity Information Facility (CBIF) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
International Barcode of Life
Former Botanical Garden research director and Centre for Plant Research faculty member Dr. Sean Graham, is a participant in the International Barcode of Life project. DNA from species in UBC Botanical Garden’s collections have been sequenced and are part of the Barcode Library.
OneKP
Through Dr. Sean Graham’s work, RNA from UBC Botanical Garden’s conifer collections is being shared with the OneKP project. The OneKP (1kP) initiative is a public-private partnership generating large scale gene sequence information for 1,000 different species of plants. UBC Botanical Garden’s contributions of conifer plant tissue can be found by searching the OneKP list of plants for “graham.”
MonAToL
Dr. Sean Graham’s lab is a participant in an NSF-funded project to assemble a comprehensive phylogeny for the monocotyledons, MonAToL, part of the Assembling the Tree of Life project.
Botanic Garden Conservation International
UBC Botanical Garden is a data contributor to Botanic Garden Conservation International‘s Plant Search database. This database gives conservation researchers and professionals the ability to locate rare and threatened plant species in cultivation around the world. The database presently includes over 575,000 records from botanical gardens around the world.