Research at Tsukuba Botanical Garden

Research at Tsukuba Botanical Garden

Understanding Biodiversity

Today, more than 300,000 species of flowering plants, or angiosperms, are known to exist on Earth. Although plants may seem unchanging to humans, whose lives span less than a hundred years, they have been evolving since their appearance on Earth 4 billion years ago, continuing to diversify even today. This plant diversity has arisen through various environmental factors such as differences in water, light, and soil, as well as interactions with other organisms, including symbiosis, parasitism, and predation involving fungi, animals, and other plants. To study this diversity, it is essential to work with living plants themselves as research material.

At the Tsukuba Botanical Garden, we cultivate and manage about 7,000 living plants, mainly ferns and flowering plants, while collecting and conserving endangered species. Using these plants as research material, we analyze adaptive morphology, genes, chromosomes, secondary metabolites, and other traits that can only be studied in living specimens, in order to investigate plant diversification and their interactions with other organisms. The garden is also open to the public, where visitors can observe about 3,000 plant species on site.