The 23rd Congress of the Association for the Taxonomic Study of the Flora of Tropical Africa (AETFAT) took place in Accra, Ghana, from 3 to 8 August 2025. As part of Symposium 1 “Advancement of African Floras & new developments in plant identification”, the GUARDEN and MAMBO projects jointly presented recent achievements in biodiversity research from Madagascar.

MAMBO’s contribution focused on methodological innovations in plant community analysis. These advances are enabling researchers to better understand how plant species assemble and interact in Madagascar’s ecosystems. By moving beyond individual species records, MAMBO’s approaches support the interpretation of patterns in diversity, community composition and ecological processes at the landscape scale. This work strengthens the scientific basis for conservation action and habitat management.

Through collaboration with GUARDEN, these analytical methods have been applied to newly collected data from across Madagascar, including more than 8,000 plant observations and over 1,500 endemic Malagasy species now represented in the global Pl@ntNet database. The integration of these observations into community-level analyses marks a step forward in understanding and protecting the island’s unique flora.

The joint achievements of MAMBO and GUARDEN were shared alongside a presentation by Rova Andriamamonjy from the University of Antananarivo, highlighting the role of Pl@ntNet in improving plant identification and documentation for Madagascar.