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Editor's Picks

Group photos Texas OODs
Five days of oaking in the Lone Star State.
Roderick Cameron | Oct 21, 2023
Tour Participants on Fiddler Peak
An account of the Tour guided by Sean Hogan
Website Editor | Oct 19, 2023
Quercus pacifica
An collection specializing in native Californian oaks
Christina Varnava | Oct 18, 2023

Plant Focus

A small but mature Alabama sandstone oak producing acorns © Patrick Thompson
A Critically Endangered dwarf oak 

Oak Conservation and Research Grants

Categories

Habitat restoration: The practice of renewing or restoring degraded habitats and ecosystems to support oak regeneration through interventions such as canopy thinning, removing invasive plant species, excluding non-native herbivores, and modifying fire regimens.

Ex-situ conservation: Protecting a species outside of its natural habitat and/or range by maintaining genetically diverse and representative collections, either in botanic garden and arboretum living collections, in cryopreservation, or in tissue culture. Since oaks are “exceptional species” their acorns cannot be seed banked through conventional methods, so these other types of ex-situ collections are critically important conservation tools.

Field survey and population monitoring: Conducting observational studies in the wild to correctly identify species and to determine if a species is present or absent in its historic or predicted range; evaluating size, health, growth, phenology, hybridization, seed production, age-class distribution, and other characteristics of populations; identifying threats to populations.

Education: Providing training, teaching, outreach, and public engagement to raise awareness of the importance of oaks and solutions to the threatening factors that are driving them to extinction.

Population reintroduction and reinforcement: The purposeful, strategic, and scientifically informed planting of threatened species into the wild in their historic or future predicted range to maintain or increase genetic diversity and ensure future resiliency and adaptive capacity of the species.