A billion seeds and counting

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 …