Scientists Want to Save Nature, One Seed at a Time

Sure, food crop seeds get their own fallout shelter below the ice in Svalbard, but what about wild plant seeds? What are they, chopped liver?

No more. Writing in the October issue of Bioscience, a group of researchers is calling for a new seed bank for wild species. This bank wouldn’t be for conservation, though, but for the purpose of researching wild plant evolution.

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Instead of gathering seeds once for storage, the so-called “Resurrection Initiative” would collect seeds from each species periodically as a way to monitor and track genetic changes over time. Understanding how species evolve could help scientists better understand, for instance, how plants do — or don’t — adapt to climate change.

“If we found, for example, that the plants that come from seeds that were collected 50 years from now flower much earlier than those that were collected today, we could logically infer that natural selection over 50 years had favored plants, that is genotypes, that flowered earlier and earlier, relative to those that delayed flowering,” says Susan J. Mazer, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

It’s a fascinating proposition, and one worth putting into action, whether the goal is research or simply preserving the seeds of biological diversity. You can read more about the proposal here. To get more background on the Svalbard seed bank, read the entry at the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

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