Seed banks and botanic gardens team up to save food plants
Crop Improvement
The unusual heirloom vegetables and wild fruit relatives growing in your local botanic garden could soon be part of a coordinated global effort that also feeds seeds and knowledge back to gardeners like you.
Seed banks store seeds of crops, while botanic gardens grow living plants and teach the public about them. For years they've done this work apart. Now they're joining forces through a new group, the Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants, to protect the many kinds of food plants that are disappearing and to get that diversity into wider use.
Key Findings
Genebanks and botanic gardens hold large, complementary collections of food plant diversity but have historically worked in isolation on conservation, research, and education.
Four essential steps are proposed: documenting the multiple dimensions of food plant diversity, conserving it, positioning it for broader use, and raising awareness, all requiring coordinated information, policies, and actions.
The authors announce the launch of the Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants and highlight recent examples of successful cross-sector collaboration.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Seed banks and botanic gardens both protect food plant diversity but have mostly worked separately. A new Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants aims to bring them together so more crop varieties and wild relatives get saved, studied, and used.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Enhance food plant diversity conservation and use through greater coordination between genebanks and botanic gardens
Societal Impact Statement Food plants are vital to human and planetary health, but their diversity is threatened, making food security, nutrition, and environmental goals more difficult to achieve....
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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Seed saving is the practice of collecting and preserving seeds or reproductive material from plants for replanting in subsequent growing seasons, a method that has sustained agriculture for roughly 12,000 years. For plant science, it serves as a critical mechanism for maintaining genetic diversity
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