Kevin Martin

He's going to talk about the work that Kew Gardens are doing, and that will feed into some of our discussions later. Thank you very much. Thank you to KaarbonTech for inviting me today to give a bit of discussion about what we've been up to at Kew. This is still early research, but we're starting to get some interesting results, and it's starting to guide our succession planning as we look at the Kew landscape. Kew's focus is to understand and protect, plan, and fund for the well-being of people and the future of all life on Earth. It's not just about trees; it's also looking at food security. Many science teams are looking at how we can get food security for everyone throughout the world. This feeds into our living collections. Our aspirations are to end the extinction crisis and manage the natural world sustainably. This relates to tropical plants, but also the core value of what Kew does. We do lots of conservation. That's why we have glass houses and living collections. We're starting to understand how these living collections are becoming more important to influence you and hopefully lead into some information into nurseries and how we can push things forward when we start to look at species selection. We have over 2000 species of trees and plants within the arboretum at Kew. We started using climatic models to understand how those plants are interacting with the landscape. This is becoming more important. We only have to look at this summer and the effects it can have. We're using climatic models to understand what species have a better success rate, ones that we can potentially see thrive going forward. We're trying to understand how we can better select trees to safeguard collections and urban landscapes. We've heard from Kenton today about how important trees are within the urban landscape. This is helping us to achieve that while trying to increase species establishment. Part of the work I've been doing with my colleague Tom, head of plant records, is analysing our living collections, biased towards trees. We can see that 15% of Kew's tree collection is within their natural range, under predicted climates to 2090. These are standardized climatic models and predictions from Europe. We're starting to understand how this will affect our trees. The real interest for me is the 38%. They're on the edge of their tolerance, and we need to understand how those plants will interact with the climate. We need to understand how we can move that 15% and increase it, but also how we can shrink the 38%. This is the research we've been looking into. Unfortunately, with the 47%, it's very unlikely that these trees will be represented within the collection of Kew, especially outside where we can't control climatic conditions. We need to focus on this from a collections point of view. We're managing assets for conservation. This 47% is where we look at how we can distribute this material. Maybe we take propagation material and share that with other botanical institutes that have a better suitable climate. This is an ongoing process that will take time and study. Using TD documents, I've started an assessment using the same criteria as we do for Kew and looked at what's available in nurseries now. Currently, when we look at nursery stocks and climatic modeling, 42% are within their natural range. We then have 17% which are on the edge of their range, interesting plants where we can adjust and find new genetic material with those trees that are better suited to our changing climate. We then have 27% which look unlikely to be growing by 2050-2090 cos the climatic change will be too harsh. And then we have 14%. These are the really interesting ones. We're starting to get new data sets to fill in the gaps. The 14% are often cultivars and hybrids, and we don't have that data. We're trying to fill in the gaps for better understanding. This summer showed the predicted increases in temperature. As a tree manager, this summer was the first realization of what looks like it's going to become a theme. It's scary to see the Kew collection suffer so quickly. It intrigued me to understand how we can change management practices and species selection. It's not nice seeing brown and dead trees. It's not good for the visitor experience, and we could be losing vulnerable species. This information is leading us to help with species selection. Currently, our precipitation levels are going to be key for us, especially at Kew, on our soil types. Under the predicted modeling, we're looking at between 606-1150 mil precipitation. Kew is planted on a floodplain, not the best. This data set is just on Tilia. We can already identify species that are more suitable. Many Japanese and Chinese plants need more water than we can currently provide them naturally at Kew. Those need more intensive management, like irrigation. We're fortunate Kew is a tackle institute, we're allowed to irrigate. But those things are becoming more difficult and expensive. Water's becoming a commodity. We need to adapt our landscape. This is one of the distribution models we've been working on. We look at where and what plants grow, through data analysis. The brown dots are the occurrences of Tilia species. Ideally, we would pin it down to one single taxer to understand the provenance. We're starting to understand natural traits and their environment. The darker the green, the more suited it's going to be to climatic conditions. When we look at Kew and London, when we match the climatic patterns, it's more akin to Mediterranean and Sub Mediterranean climatic conditions. We need to start looking at those ecosystems to select plants. Many of our native species are actually distributed throughout Europe. With this information, we can identify appropriate provenance for seed collection and genetically bring more resistance to deal with climatic stress. These are other sections of the globe we can look at, like California and central Chile. We need to understand the flora in those regions to understand how they could fit into the Kew landscape. Using different data sets, we can map precipitation. We're trying to build resilience to the reduced water availability of Kew. This is one way to map it globally on rgis. We map where the precipitation levels could potentially match us at Kew. Learning how trees can hydraulically adapt to trap dress is something we're looking into. These are the areas on the precipitation models which would be suitable for huge change in climate. Here's an example: the tree on the right is Tilia tomentosa. I don't know the provenance of that tree cos it's from a nursery stock. These things are becoming more important. On the left is Tilia di Styler. I know the collection date, collected in 1977 by Roy Lancaster. These trees, photos taken at the same time in the middle of the drought, show which one is growing best. This is what's kicked in, and we're testing these models by observing what we see in the landscape. We need to look at things in more detail and test it. The plan is over the next 2-3 years to select trees. We've selected three trees within their range, three on the edge, and three on the outside, growing them in batches of 50 in our nursery to test the modeling. This is supported by Doctor Andrew Hirons. We need to test this modeling data because it will give us a good idea of how accurate they can be. Resources like Kew are important. It's one of the biggest vast resources we have, and the data we collect will hopefully guide us in creating a sustainable future landscape for all of us. We hope to create a toolkit with advice and tools to aid in species selection. Kew has a lot of curation bias. We're trying to move away from planting our favorite trees and use science and data to select trees that are more suitable to our climate. We're climatic matching rather than choosing our favorites. With the success of this program, we can understand the Kew landscape by 2090. Tom does a lot of work to help us. We need to understand how we can manage the landscape, including irrigation management. If we know plants require a certain amount of irrigation, like plants from East Asia that need over 1000 mil of precipitation, we can adapt irrigation management. Frustratingly, Kew is taxon led. We now know that's not always possible. With information from this research, we can redesign and plant our landscape. For instance, we can group plants that require a vast amount of water so we can target and manage irrigation in areas rather than irrigating the whole site. Understanding precipitation on site will help us understand our landscape and soils. Kew is on gravel and sand, a pretty rubbish place to plant an old reum. We lose vast amounts of water and nutrients. We do a lot of soil management, adding organic mulch. We still rely on water. With this information, we hope to move forward to a more sustainable landscape. This is why the opportunity with KaarbonTech to have your data to understand what's happening in the urban environment is important. I can manage my data, but it's the communication out. What's the point of me doing all these studies if it doesn't help local authorities and urban camp professionals? We all have a responsibility to help maintain it. That's why the opportunity to work with KaarbonTech is a good idea. If you're interested in more research, here's your QR code.'