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Seeds stored in seed banks of wild species will become museum pieces unless the ‘bankers' employ shrewd collection strategies, argues Professor Kingsley Dixon of The University of Western Australia and Perth's Kings Park and Botanic Garden.

In an opinion piece published today in Nature , Professor Dixon argues that holding seeds against the threat of extinction is only part of the challenge.  Such seeds are frozen in time and attempts to plant them in future, changed habitats will be doomed unless seed banks take steps that include teaming with climate modellers to predict vegetation patterns.

Seed banks - such as the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, UK, and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic - should harvest as much genetic diversity as possible so that collections are more likely to contain plants with traits suited to a changed climate, Professor Dixon writes.

They should also collect species at the limits of their ranges, where plants often have higher levels of genetic novelty, for example at the upper and lower limits of their altitude ranges.

Another strategy is to collect samples from the same locations every 10 or 20 years because as the climate changes, wild populations will produce natural variants better adapted to the new conditions.

In order to rebuild the world's ecosystems, wild seed banks must think big.  Rather than gathering the usual 100 grams for each variety, they may need to collect large quantities up to 100 kilograms or more for some species.

Professor Dixon wrote the article, "Time to Future-Proof Plants in Storage" https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7274/full/462721a.html with co-author Professor Jeffrey Walck of Middle Tennessee State University.

Media references

Professor Kingsley Dixon (UWA School of Plant Biology)  (+ 61 8)  9480 3614
Janine MacDonald (UWA Public Affairs)  (+61 8)  6488 5563  /  (+61 4) 32 637 716