WEST SUSSEX, England: With two in five plant species at the risk of extinction, giving a safe home to some of the world’s most threatened flora is a pressing concern.
In an effort to address the problem, the Millennium Seed Bank in the United Kingdom has built up a collection of 2.4 billion seeds representing more than 40,000 species.
They come from around 11,000 trees and shrub species.
The huge collection of wild plant seeds from around the world is kept safe underground in rural Sussex in England. They include contributions from Mozambique, Madagascar, and Armenia.
The seeds are X-rayed, dried, weighed, and sorted, then kept as a backup of the world’s wild plant species.
“There are various objectives. I would say perhaps the two main ones are first of all, to create almost like a Noah’s Ark of plants so that if anything goes extinct, then we can use the seeds to reintroduce them to the wild,” said Asia coordinator of Millennium Seed Bank Partnership Kate Hardwick.
“But a more immediate use is to use the seeds for research. So this might be research into crop production, looking at the wild relatives of crop species, or it might be research into rare species perhaps to find out why they are so rare, and how to propagate them, and how to reintroduce them to the wild.”
