The Global Genome Initiative for Gardens (GGI-Gardens) is an international partnership of botanical gardens and arboreta focused on collecting herbarium vouchers from living collections and preserving their genome resources in biorepositories partnered with the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN).

The GGI-Gardens Awards Program aims to promote partnership activities to preserve and understand Earth’s genomic biodiversity of plants. To this aim, we seek to support collection and preservation activities at botanic gardens around the world. This program, funded by GGI-Gardens and United States Botanic Garden, and administered through BGCI’s Global Botanic Garden Fund, will provide up to 15 awards of up to $4,500 to support sampling activities from living collections with unique families and genera of vascular plants not yet represented in GGBN biorepositories.

This call for applications for awards through the GGI-Gardens Awards Program is open from 22 September 2020 – 15 November 2020.

Any BGCI member, to include both current and prospective members of GGI-Gardens are eligible to apply. Institutions with successful proposals who have not yet joined GGI-Gardens must − as a minimum − become a GGI-Gardens partner by signing the GGI-Gardens Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) prior to the awarding of funds. Eligible institutions will need to identify a recognised herbarium where they will deposit collected plant vouchers as well as a GGBN-partnered biorepository for the storage of preserved genomic tissues.

The GGI-Gardens Awards Program application will require the following information:

• Contact information;
• Project Title;
• Proof of project approval by Director/Head of applicant organisation;
• Identification of herbarium and biorepository in which to deposit samples;
• Proposal Abstract;
• Genetic Collection Description (families anticipated for collection, genera anticipated for collection etc…);
• Collection Database Description; and an
• Itemised budget