The Missouri Botanical Garden is headquartered in the USA and in 1987 it launched its Madagascar Programme (MBG-Madagascar), which today is committed to understanding and safeguarding the island’s unique, diverse and highly threatened flora, and their ecosystems. Focused in and around 11 Priority Areas for Plant Conservation, MBG-Madagascar collaborates with communities at the local level to protect the rich biodiversity of the island and the natural heritage of the Malagasy people.
Since the 1970s, MBG-Madagascar’s work has focused on understanding and preventing the loss of Madagascar’s uniquely rich and irreplaceable floral diversity. Home to 11,500 vascular plant species – at least 82% of which are endemic – the Malagasy flora stands out as a global priority for research and conservation. For decades MBG-Madagascar has carried out vital work to discover, describe and database flora species through inventory, taxonomic research, assessments of the risk status of species, and analyses to identify priority areas for plant conservation.
Except for its international Technical Advisor, all 90 of MBG-Madagascar’s permanent staff are Malagasy, and all rangers and plant nursery staff are recruited locally. Their work to preserve their floral heritage has helped demonstrate the global importance of conserving and restoring Madagascar’s forest fragments, where many locally endemic plants cling to existence.
World Land Trust (WLT) has been in contact with MBG-Madagascar since 2018 and we formally became partners in 2023, marking the beginning of a project to expand and protect the highly threatened Ankarabolava-Agnakatrika forests which were once part of a vast arboreal expanse covering the entire eastern region of Madagascar.
With WLT funds, MBG-Madagascar will expand the Ankarabolava-Agnakatrika Protected Area by acquiring an additional 200 ha of degraded habitat surrounding the existing protected lands. This will then be restored to native forest with a special focus on improving the status of certain tree species that are now very rare at this site. WLT funds will support 12 rangers as well as other MBG-Madagascar staff working on the project. As part of the project, MBG-Madagascar will also provide 30 tree nursery training opportunities for local people, who will then be compensated to produce and plant the 500,000 native trees on the acquired land: skills that they will then be able to transfer to establish their own nurseries, producing young plants for sale.
Please see our Madagascar page.
Since MBG-Madagascar’s first intervention at this site in 2009, and especially following Ankarabolava-Agnakatrika’s designation as a new protected area in 2015, the site-based team have overseen the activity of community patrols to discourage shifting cultivation and the illicit exploitation of timber. In addition, through local committees, the team have informed and facilitated the sustainable harvesting of natural resources in some specially defined parts of the site.
Grants from different donors have also enabled special time-limited interventions including:
