A billion seeds and counting

Abstract

To mark World Biodiversity Day last month, the UK's Millennium Seed Bank celebrated a landmark in its quest to collect a significant proportion of the world's flora and a new database promoting biodiversity was also opened earlier in the month. Nigel Williams reports. To mark World Biodiversity Day last month, the UK's Millennium Seed Bank celebrated a landmark in its quest to collect a significant proportion of the world's flora and a new database promoting biodiversity was also opened earlier in the month. Nigel Williams reports. The UK's Millennium Seed Bank, part of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has collected its billionth seed for safekeeping and conservation. The seed was presented to the British chancellor, Gordon Brown, ahead of an official ceremony at the Seed Bank in southern England late last month to mark World Biodiversity Day. The Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) Project is one of the most ambitious conservation projects in the world. Conceived after the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, the project is based on three central tenets of the Convention on Biological Diversity: conservation, sustainable use and equitable sharing of benefits. Today, the MSB holds the largest wild seed collection in the world and works with over 100 partner organisations in 50 countries forming a global network to provide an effective, low-cost insurance against the loss of species in their natural environments. The MSB currently contains the seeds of more than 18,000 wild plant species from 126 countries, including 88 per cent of the total UK flora, with duplicate collections in partner seed banks worldwide. By 2010, 10 per cent of the world's wild flowering plant species (totalling 30,000 species) will be banked, with priority given to those that are endangered, endemic or of current local use or potential economic use. The MSB has the capacity to store seeds from up to half of the world's wild plant species, and each one of these seeds has the potential to become a plant. The billionth seed is from an African bamboo, Oxytenanthera abyssinica, and was collected in Mali by the MSBP partner institution in the country, the Institut d'Economie Rurale. Within Mali, and other sub-Saharan African countries, this bamboo is used for house construction, furniture, basket and wine making. The bamboo is valuable to local people but over-harvesting has led to the species becoming endangered in Mali. The species is a priority for conservation for a number of reasons: its natural habitat is under increasing threat, it is a very useful plant, and it sets seed only once every seven years. Like many bamboo species, the flowering and fruiting of this African bamboo is synchronised across the region, so all the plants flower, fruit and then die back within a single year. The phenomenon has led to the superstition in Mali that the fruiting of the bamboo is a bad omen for kings, conquerors and chiefs. It last seeded in 2006. The MSB now holds several thousand seeds from this species, which will be used for conservation research both at the MSB and in Mali. Several thousand seeds are banked for every species at the MSB and the collection is heavily used. Every species collection is germination tested to ensure that seeds can be turned into plants. This germination information, as well as the seeds themselves, is then available to agriculturists, horticulturists, foresters and others who wish to use it for human wellbeing. Skills, knowledge and data from seed banks support wider plant conservation activities, including those to alleviate the anticipated impact of habitat loss and climate change. As well as being used for research purposes, seeds are also used for species reintroduction and habitat restoration projects around the world. Over the past five years, more than 3,000 seed collections have been used to support research in the sustainability areas of water, environment, health, agriculture and biodiversity. Seed conservation facilities have also been installed in 10 African countries and 1,200 people worldwide have been trained in seed conservation techniques. Paul Smith, head of the MSB, said: “Plant diversity is a vital part of the system upon which we depend. The need for the kind of insurance policy the Millennium Seed Bank provides has never been greater”. Earlier last month another project was launched to document all the 1.8 million named species of life on Earth. Called the Encyclopedia of Earth, the aim is to provide everyone with up-to-date, multi-media information on all known species, including new ones as they are discovered. The project has been launched by the Field Museum at Harvard University, the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole, the Smithsonian Institution and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. “The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” says James Edwards, executive director of the project. The effort is backed by a $10 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “Through collaboration, we all can increase our appreciation of the immense variety of life, the challenges to it, and ways to conserve biodiversity.”