Dear Colleagues and Friends,

You are warmly invited to the 3rd Conference of Eastern and Central European Botanic Gardens to be held in Budapest, Hungary from 9 to 11 October 2017 at the Buda Campus and Arboretum of Szent István University on the occasion that the organizer Hungarian Association of Arboreta and Botanic Gardens (HAABG) celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.

We appreciate and reckon EastCentGard as a valuable and important regional initiation, so our committed intention is to revitalize it. EastCentGard III to follow in line ECG I (Tartu, Estonia - 2003) and ECG II (Warsaw/Rogów, Poland - 2007) and it is going to address the classic features of botanic gardens and the challenges they are currently facing in the CEE region.

Focusing on the relations of botanic gardens and society, especially in terms of serving public goods, main topics will cover the function of botanic gardens as knowledge centres, the triad of strategy- management-operation as well as social aspects of gardens’ classic roles including conservation and education.

In cases of every themes organizers invite oral and poster presentations about nice examples, successful projects, model cases, good practices and/or fruitful collaboration with strong BG activity and/or partnership, all of them are worthy for following/adaptation. Scientific Committee is opened for themes on wide scale, but relevancy and strong affection for BGs are expected.

Over the main themes, organizers call every Eastern and Central European countries to introduce their botanic gardens and arboreta and/or their national network in the poster section.

Although EastCentGard III is a region-focused conference, it is an open community which welcomes experts from any other part of Europe or other continents.

We are looking forward to welcoming you to Budapest, Hungary!

On behalf of the Scientific and Organizing Committees,