Plant collections that exist outside of their natural environments — for example, in herbaria, seed banks or living collections — are crucial tools in biodiversity conservation. In this issue, Cano et al. evaluate the management of ex situ living plant collections spanning more than a century, and Davis et al. outline best practices for the sustainable, equitable and ethical sampling of herbarium specimens. This month’s cover image is of a diverse display of tropical plant species under ex situ cultivation in the glasshouses at Cambridge University Botanic Garden, Cambridge, UK.

See Brockington et al. and Davis et al

Madagascar is home to an extraordinary level of endemic biodiversity, but quantifying this is complicated by cryptic diversity among some genera such as mouse lemurs (genus Microcebus). Van Elst et al. shed light on this by presenting a generalizable, integrative framework to characterize the species diversity of this taxonomically controversial genus, demonstrating that it has been overestimated. The photograph depicts Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur (Microcebus berthae), which may recently have gone extinct, in Menabe Central Forest in Madagascar. In a second paper in this issue, Orkin et al. analyse genome-wide resequencing data from 50 species of lemurs, revealing high levels of genomic diversity and demographic declines consistent with the historic timing of human expansion across the island.

See Tobias van Elst et al. and Joseph D. Orkin et al.