摘要
Plants play important roles in international trade and cultural exchange. Mention of the Silk Road instantly conjures images of plants and plant products, from the tea of China (Lagarde, 2017), to pepper, flax, spices, grapes, and pomegranates of South and Central Asia (Xi, 2017). In 2015, when China officially launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), biodiversity conservation was repeatedly emphasized in joint communiques of the Leaders' Roundtable of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. However, our knowledge of both plant diversity and conservation in the Belt and Road Countries is limited, which hampers our planning and implementation on the eco-friendly infrastructural projects as promoted by the BRI. To promote regional cooperation and knowledge sharing on plant diversity and conservation, in September 2018, the Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB), under the sponsorship of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), organized an international workshop entitled “International Workshop on Plant Diversity and Conservation of the One Belt and One Road Countries.” This special issue of Plant Diversity presents some of the outcomes of the workshop.
