NEWS & EVENTS

The 23rd Congress of the Association for the Taxonomic Study of the Flora of Tropical Africa (AETFAT), held in Accra, Ghana from August 3 to 8, 2025, provided a dynamic platform for sharing innovations in plant science and conservation across tropical Africa and Madagascar. As part of Symposium 1 “Advancement of African Floras & new developments in plant identification”, the GUARDEN and MAMBO projects jointly highlighted major achievements in biodiversity science from Madagascar.

Two key areas of progress were at the center of GUARDEN and MAMBO’s contributions.

First, the GUARDEN project has substantially improved Madagascar’s biodiversity monitoring capabilities. By mobilizing field teams across the island and integrating advanced digital tools such as the Pl@ntNet platform, GUARDEN has enabled the collection of over 8,000 plant observations, including more than 1,500 endemic Malagasy species newly added to the global Pl@ntNet database. This initiative has expanded the digital accessibility of Madagascar’s unique flora and empowered researchers, students, and citizen scientists with better tools for plant identification. These gains in monitoring capacity contribute directly to long-term biodiversity assessment, ecological research, and conservation planning.

Second, through its collaboration with MAMBO, the initiative has made significant strides in plant community analysis. MAMBO’s methodological innovations have provided new insights into how plant species assemble and interact in Madagascar’s ecosystems. The co-produced work of GUARDEN and MAMBO has allowed researchers to move beyond individual species records to interpret patterns of diversity, community composition, and ecological processes at landscape scale. This analytical progression strengthens the scientific basis for conservation action and habitat management.

One of the highlights of GUARDEN’s presence at the Congress was a presentation by Rova Andriamamonjy from the University of Antananarivo (UNTNR). Through a poster and oral presentation, he detailed the use of the Pl@ntNet platform to improve the identification and documentation of Madagascar’s unique flora. Thanks to extensive fieldwork carried out as part of GUARDEN, more than 8,000 new plant observations were uploaded to Pl@ntNet, including over 1,500 endemic Malagasy species that were previously underrepresented in the database. This contribution significantly enriches the global plant identification infrastructure, making Madagascar’s endemic flora more accessible to scientists, students, and citizens alike.