The American Botanical Council (ABC) has presented its 2024 Steven Foster Botanical Conservation and Sustainability Award to Danna J. Leaman, PhD, a Canadian-American conservation biologist and ethnobotanist.
 
Leaman is the co-chair and Red List authority of the Medicinal Plant Specialist Group (MPSG) of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN’s) Species Survival Commission (SSC), a founding member of the FairWild Foundation’s Board of Trustees, and a research associate at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. She is also a member of ABC’s Advisory Board.
 
The Steven Foster Award was created in 2022 after the passing of the eponymous botanist, author, and photographer, to commemorate his professional interest, writing, and advocacy work in the field.
 
Foster spent more than 40 years in the field of sustainability and the conservation of herbs and medicinal plants. He served on ABC’s board of trustees for more than two decades, ten years of which he served as chair. He was also a consultant for ABC’s Sustainable Herbs Program, advocated for botanical industry trade resolutions to protect threatened botanicals, and was a founding member of the advisory board of the United Plant Savers, a nonprofit plant conservation organization.
 
Each year, the award recognizes an individual, nonprofit organization, or commercial herb company that is committed to sustainable/regenerative practices in the botanical industry or wider community. Recipients have taken action to address botanical conservation and sustainability issues and contribute to a broader understanding of cultural and biological diversity, soil health, climate change, economic justice, and more, and demonstrate an appreciation of the beauty of the natural world.
 
“Among the many rewards in each new issue of HerbalGram are Steven Foster’s photographs, which simultaneously capture the minute details and the broader essence of flowers, plants, and places in nature,” Leaman wrote. “Steven’s photographs and life of work have contributed to the conservation and sustainability of medicinal and aromatic plants — in complex detail as well as in essence. In creating the Steven Foster Award, ABC honors not only Steven’s many contributions to this field but also the essential, often quietly diligent and detailed efforts that build the tools and enable the practice of conservation and sustainable use of medicinal and aromatic plants. As the most recent recipient of this award, I acknowledge the contributions of the previous recipients, the United Plant Savers (2022) and the FairWild Foundation (2023), and am honoured by this recognition of my own contributions including through the work of the MPSG and as a founding trustee of the FairWild Foundation.”
 
“At a time when reversing threats to the survival of the earth’s amazing biological diversity appears to require shifting global approaches, policies, and paradigms, I believe I share with many others a sense of trying to ‘save the world, one species at a time,’” Leaman concluded. 
 
“Those who have worked alongside Dr. Leaman, as I have, on boards, expert committees, and working groups, know that her life’s work is steeped in the collaborative co-development of credible standards, scientific methods, and tools for the conservation, protection, and monitoring of commercially traded medicinal plant species, not only in Canada and the United States, but globally,” said Josef Brinckmann, president of ABC’s board of trustees and founding member of the FairWild Foundation’s board of trustees. “Her work is often behind the scenes of projects that reach the desks of policy makers at the national and international levels.” 
 
Leaman has spent more than 40 years working for the conservation and sustainable use of plants through personal research, research teams, nonprofits, and government-supported agencies. She has developed sustainability and biodiversity standards, and has a range of advisory and consulting experience related to regulation and policy.
 
Leaman is a founding member of the MPSG, where she works on global and regional IUCN Red List conservation assessments of priority species of medicinal and economically important plants. Her current projects include the first regional IUCN Red List conservation status assessment of North American medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs), the second regional assessment of European MAPs, assessment of all MAP species listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and assessment of all World Health Organization (WHO)-monographed MAP species. 
 
In 2004, Leaman played a lead role in an international consultation workshop on the revision of the WHO/IUCN/World Wildlife Fund 1993 Guidelines on the Conservation of Medicinal Plants. Consequently, the German government funded the “International Standard for the Sustainable Wild Collection of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants” (ISSC-MAP). The German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), along with participants from the WWF, MPSG, TRAFFIC, and industry formed a steering group to develop and test the proposed new international standard, of which Leaman was a lead author of the initial drafts.
 
Eventually, ISSC-MAP and FairWild merged in 2008, at which point Leaman became a founding member of the newly-established FairWild Foundation.
 
She has been involved in ethnobotanical and conservation field research programs in Brazil, the Caribbean, Central America, Indonesia, Lebanon, and several other countries with organizations including UNESCO, International Development Research Centre (IDRC), WWF, TRAFFIC International, Bioversity International, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 
 
At ABC, she has served on the advisory board since 2010, and was an inaugural member of SHP’s advisory group in 2019. She has peer-reviewed articles on HerbalGram and HerbClip.
 
With Leah Oliver, she authored an extensive cover article, “Protecting Goldenseal: How Status Assessments Inform Conservation.” In issue 119 in 2018