The Taxonomic Foundation of Conservation: Integrated Approaches to Safeguarding Plant Diversity

Dear Colleagues,

Global plant diversity faces unprecedented threats from habitat loss, climate change, and over-exploitation across geographical regions and ecosystems. Effective conservation hinges on a fundamental prerequisite: knowing exactly what we are protecting. However, achieving taxonomic clarity is often far from straightforward, as taxonomy—the essential "language" of biology—frequently disconnects from the immediate needs of conservation practitioners and policymakers.

This Special Issue seeks to emphasize the indispensable role of plant taxonomy in biodiversity conservation. We invite original research, comprehensive reviews, and insightful perspectives that demonstrate how taxonomic clarity (or its absence) directly influences the persistence of evolutionary plant lineages and conservation outcomes. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Description, re-establishment, and/or consolidation of plant species new to science.
• Rediscovery and taxonomic confirmation of rare plant taxa across geographical scales.
• Taxonomic elucidation of cryptic species and/or species complexes and revisions of threatened or data-deficient plant taxa.
• Applications of museomics (herbarium DNA) in the conservation of extinct-in-the-wild or critically endangered species.
• Botanical inventories, seed germination investigations, ex situ propagation studies, or cryopreservation of taxa with legal protection and/or conservation priority for reinforcement of wild populations and/or sustainable utilization strategies.
• Floristics, bioinformatics, and open access data to accelerate species descriptions, especially in biodiversity hotspots.
• Integration of taxonomic data and conservation prioritization into Biodiversity Strategic Action Plans across geographical scales.

We encourage submissions that provide actionable insights, moving beyond pure description toward the practical application of taxonomic knowledge in the field.

Dr. Pepy Bareka
Dr. Nikos Krigas
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Plants is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.