In today’s post we will be exploring the unique challenges faced by living collections with a focus on flora and fauna housed in botanical gardens, zoos, aquariums, and parks. Unlike traditional museums with collections comprised of static objects, living collections change as constantly as their specimens breathe. They grow, reproduce, become ill, and eventually die. These realities create challenges that require specialized staff, intensive recordkeeping, and significant financial resources. This post will also examine the darker history of many living collections and how these institutions have evolved over time.

Living Collections: The Pitfalls and Setbacks

A Brief History of Living Collections

Living collections have existed for centuries. Early zoos and aquariums became popular forms of entertainment and casual exploitation and abuse of animals. Early botanical gardens were frequently established to cultivate economically valuable plants, medicinal species, or crops connected to colonial expansion. Many gardens in the Americas emerged from plantation landscapes and were built off the backs of unknown enslaved African American men and women. 

One example is Magnolia Plantation, one of the oldest public gardens in the United States. Originally established as a plantation in the seventeenth century, the site later transformed into a public garden after early gardening efforts were established to ease the plantation owner’s wife into country living. Today, visitors experience carefully cultivated landscapes, but the plantation’s history reminds us that many botanical collections are rooted in colonialism, land exploitation, WPA funded projects, and slavery.

Similarly, zoological collections originated as royal menageries where exotic animals symbolized wealth and power. Animals were collected from around the world and displayed with little regard for their welfare. These collections eventually evolved into public zoos during the nineteenth century, but many institutions continued to prioritize entertainment over animal care. To this day the ethics of zoos and aquariums are still heavily debated, with modern animal exhibits in various countries consistently facing heavy backlash from the public and animal rights activists.

The Value of Living Collections

Living collections serve purposes that extend beyond public enjoyment. According to Raven (1989), living collections provide invaluable opportunities for conservation, research, education, and species preservation. Botanical gardens often maintain rare or endangered plant species that may no longer thrive in their native habitats. A good example of this can be found in Norfolk, Virginia. The Norfolk botanical garden is setting up to open their new conservatory building which houses a desert biome containing plants that were taken from habitats that are now covered in condos. Similarly, zoos and aquariums participate in breeding programs designed to prevent extinction and maintain genetic diversity.

Parmentier and Pautasso (2010) note that botanical gardens collectively house an extraordinary diversity of plant species from around the world. These collections function as living repositories of biodiversity and often serve as important resources for scientific research.

Recent scholarship also highlights the importance of connecting living collections with preserved collections housed in museums. Poo et al. (2022) argue that live collections and natural history collections can complement one another, creating opportunities for researchers to study both living organisms and preserved specimens to better understand biodiversity and conservation challenges.

Keepers with Green Thumbs: The Need for Specialized Staff

One of the defining characteristics of living collections is their dependence on highly specialized personnel. This is something we see across all forms of living collection. 

Botanical gardens rely on horticulturalists who often develop expertise in particular plant families, ecosystems, or growing conditions. Maintaining tropical orchids, desert succulents, native woodland species, and aquatic plants requires entirely different knowledge in care strategies.

Zoos and aquariums similarly depend on teams of animal care professionals, veterinarians, nutritionists, behavioral specialists, and conservation scientists. Many accredited institutions follow standards established by organizations such as the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which require trained staff capable of maintaining animal welfare and safety.

These specialized employees must monitor everything from nutrition and disease prevention to breeding behavior and environmental enrichment. Their expertise ensures that living collections remain healthy while supporting educational and conservation goals.

Seasonal Shifts and Environmental Challenges

Unlike paintings or historical artifacts stored in climate-controlled galleries, living collections are directly affected by environmental conditions.

Plants and animals experience seasonal changes that influence growth cycles, reproduction, migration patterns, and behavior. Zoo animals are often foreign to the environment they are held captive in which can directly influence their behavior. Outdoor botanical gardens must contend with changing temperatures, droughts, storms, pests, and disease outbreaks. Climate change has introduced additional uncertainty, making it increasingly difficult to predict growing conditions and environmental stresses.

While indoor greenhouses, aquariums, and animal habitats can regulate temperature and humidity, these systems are expensive to maintain and vulnerable to equipment failures. Even minor fluctuations in water chemistry or temperature can have serious consequences for sensitive species.

As a result, living collections require constant monitoring and adaptation throughout the year.

Digital Collections Management: Tracking Living Things

Continuing off of environmental factors, managing living collections presents another pitfall as well. Recordkeeping challenges within living collections differ significantly from those associated with traditional museum collections. 

Traditional collections management systems primarily track an object’s location, condition, and ownership. Living collections must track far more dynamic information, including births, deaths, breeding histories, transfers, health records, genetic data, and environmental conditions. All of this is, of course, on top of location and other standard museum tracking protocols. 

Hunt’s (1978) discussion of living collection record systems demonstrates that accurate documentation has long been recognized as essential to successful collection management. Today, digital systems allow institutions to monitor specimens throughout their entire lifecycle.

Wyatt and Sucher (2014) argue that effective records management is especially critical for conservation-focused collections because institutions must understand the origins, genetic relationships, and health histories of individual specimens, lest we end up with incestuous animals. 

Modern digital collection management practices also reflect broader trends discussed by Turner, Muntean, and Hennessy (2024), who emphasize the importance of stewardship, documentation, and ethical management in increasingly complex collections environments.

The Costs Associated with Death

Death is an unavoidable reality within living collections. Whether flower or animal, many creatures pass far more quickly than humans. 

Unlike static museum objects, plants and animals have finite lifespans. Institutions must plan for the loss of specimens while also managing disease outbreaks, injuries, reproductive failures, and aging populations.

For zoos and aquariums, deaths can carry emotional, ethical, and financial consequences. Veterinary interventions, necropsies, and replacement efforts often require substantial resources. In some cases, institutions must make difficult decisions regarding population management, including culling, to maintain healthy and sustainable collections. This of course poses more moral dilemmas in relation to the ethics of animal keeping in modern zoos, as in every instance of a culled animal they are unable to released into the wild or stay in their man made home. 

Botanical gardens face similar challenges. Valuable plants may die from disease, environmental stress, or age, requiring years of effort and expense to replace. Rare specimens may be irreplaceable, making preventative care especially important. This is not even covering the costs associated with replacing perennials that often only live through one season. 

These realities make proactive monitoring and long-term planning essential components of living collections management.

Conclusion

Living collections require a level of care and management that extends far beyond the needs of traditional museum collections. Their histories reveal complicated relationships with colonialism, captivity, and human control over nature, while their present-day missions increasingly emphasize conservation, education, and scientific research.From maintaining biodiversity and managing seasonal environmental changes to employing specialized staff and tracking the life histories of thousands of living organisms, these collections face challenges unlike any other museum collection type. While paintings and artifacts remain relatively stable over time, living collections are constantly changing, reminding us that preserving life is often far more complicated than preserving objects.Living collections may be among the most rewarding collections to steward, but they are also among the most demanding.