Prologue

fto Fern Flora Worldwide: Threats and Responses

An International Symposium, 23-26 July 2001
British Pteridological Society with Species Survival Commission Specialist Group for Pteridophytes

In 1998 the BPS Committee decided to hold an international symposium to mark the New Millennium. The year was to be 2001, and fern conservation the theme. The present volume marks the successful outcome of these decisions.
As a Society, at the national level, we had supported Plantlife Link, a group of botanists co-ordinated by Plantlife - the Wild-plant Conservation Charity, and individual members had worked with our conservation UK Agencies (English Nature, Countryside Council for Wales, and Scottish Natural Heritage) on various programmes to conserve pteridophytes. Most important, the Society had both experience and expertise to organise such an international gathering. The University of Guildford, Surrey, was chosen as venue and Graham Ackers and his Symposium Committee ably organised the planning and domestic arrangements.
Whilst the Society's involvement with pteridophyte conservation had hitherto been limited to UK and the wider Europe, we realised from the outset that involving an international partner in planning the actual programme would 'widen the net'. The obvious partner was the Pteridophyte Specialist Group (PSG) within the IUCN (World Conservation Union) Species Survival Commission (SSC)/International Association of Pteridologists (IAP). This Specialist Group was co-chaired by a UK-based BPS member (ACJ), who therefore joined the Symposium Committee and, with a group of international contacts, planned the scientific programme.
The Symposium is a milestone in pteridophyte conservation, in providing the first opportunity for the PSG to meet as a group. Pteridologists, especially those who study floras and taxonomy, are an unfavoured race within the politics of today's biology. Nevertheless, ferns and their allies, when compared to other vascular (i.e. seed-bearing) plants are a comparatively small, and relatively well-known element in any one biome or country. As a result they are frequently used in feasibility studies for other programmes of conservation biology. In addition, the Pteridophyta is an ancient group of plants whose distribution is associated with palaeoareas of the earth and, as such, can help to identify the priority regions for conservation.
One major aim of the PSG is a Conservation Review of world pteridophytes and the conservation status of rare species and fern-rich habitats. The symposium contributed to that. Through its contributions, it also helped to develop the rationale and approach we might follow to meet our fern conservation needs. The second major aim of the Specialist Group is to publish, through the IUCN/SSC, an Action Plan - nowadays the accepted tool for promoting conservation recommendations. Such a Plan must identify the particular activities to be carried out by the actual implementers on the ground, in order to deliver solutions to the identified conservation problems. Much of what was presented and discussed at the Symposium will assist that programme.
I thank the delegates for contributing to a successful symposium and for preparing the manuscripts published in this book. I am grateful to the many reviewers and especially to Adrian Dyer, Liz Sheffield and Alastair Wardlaw for their painstaking editing of these papers. The IUCN and I are grateful to the BPS for accepting the burden of publishing these Proceedings as an enlarged issue of The Fern Gazette.
We are indebted to English Nature for substantial support towards the cost of administration and the field trip; and to New Phytologist Trust for enabling a delegate from Russia to attend and present a paper. We are thankful also for the support, spiritual and financial, given by the IAP which also made it possible for some contributors lacking institutional conference budgets to attend.                                                                           

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