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Dequan Leonard learning the ropes of tree climbing with the Tree Gang at Kew. Credit – Cecily Withall.

Capacity building supports plant conservation in the British Virgin Islands

Over the last two years, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has hosted two National Parks Trust of the Virgin Islands (NPTVI) employees at Wakehurst and Kew sites for training. This is part of the capacity building component for the project ‘Assessing BVI habitat recovery from soil seedbanks following invasives removal’. New NPTVI staff members lack specialist experience, skills, and knowledge, so training was tailored to cover a wide variety of topics to increase their plant conservation knowledge and skills.

Terrestrial Wardens Simeon Cabral and Dequan Leonard, relatively new staff members in the Trust, visited the UK in October 2024 and 2025, respectively. Their first weeks were spent at Wakehurst, where they received training in seed conservation techniques from the Millennium Seed Bank team in how to collect and store seeds to maximise their longevity, and how to germinate them to turn them back into plants. This was followed by time spent with Wakehurst horticulturalists learning how to care for living collections in the nursery, including potting and pest control.

At Kew, Simeon and Dequan were given a tour of the Herbarium and were able to help the UK Overseas Territories (UKOTs) team with identifying dried pressed plants collected from the British Virgin Islands (BVI). A day was spent in the Quarantine House, where they sowed soil that they had collected from Great Tobago National Park in BVI a couple of months prior, to see what seedlings emerged from the soil seedbank. They also helped identify seedlings (where possible) and then harvest seedlings from earlier-sown soil, placing these individually in tea bags and then in boxes with dry silica gel to preserve their DNA. The following day, in the Jodrell Laboratory, Simeon and Dequan were given an overview of the process of extracting DNA from the seedlings, to be able to confirm their identification by molecular means.

Undoubtedly a highlight was the day spent with Kew’s Tree Gang, learning the ropes of how to safely climb trees. This equipped Simeon and Dequan with the skills to enable vital tree work and pruning to keep trees healthy back in their own Botanical Garden on Tortola in BVI. They returned home after a busy two weeks eager to put all that they had learned into practice and to share their newly obtained knowledge and skills with their colleagues. This training has increased the capacity of NPTVI to care for and protect their native flora, both in the J.R. O’Neal Botanical Garden and in their National Parks.

Written by Rosemary Newton, Nancy Woodfield-Pascoe, Sara Barrios, and Thomas Heller. For more information on this Darwin Plus Main project DPLUS215, led by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew), please click here.