This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: On Oct. 13, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew) launched the Seed Portal for Online Data (SeedPOD), a new open-access platform designed to tackle bottlenecks affecting global ecological restoration, by making native seed collections and the knowledge needed to grow them easier to discover. Efforts to restore degraded ecosystems and build resilience in the face of a changing climate face a fundamental challenge: getting the right seed to the right place, along with the information needed to grow it successfully.
Recent research led by scientists at Kew's Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) at Kew Wakehurst, Sussex, has highlighted the limited availability of suitable native seed as a persistent challenge for restoration. This challenge is set against ambitious international restoration targets as, under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), countries have committed to ensuring at least 30% of degraded terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine ecosystems are under effective restoration by 2030. Seed banks around the world conserve vast collections of genetically diverse wild seeds.
Kew's Millennium Seed Bank alone holds more than 2.5 billion seeds from over 40,000 wild plant species. But finding information about what seeds exist, where they came from, whether they are available and viable, and how to successfully germinate them often requires searching across multiple institutions, scientific literature and disconnected databases. What's more, smaller seed banks and seed custodians may lack the funding or technical infrastructure to make their collections visible online at all.
SeedPOD has been developed by Kew's scientists to bring this information together, helping restoration practitioners, researchers, land managers and communities find native seed that meets their needs and understand how to propagate it successfully. Successful ecological restoration depends on more than simply finding seeds of the correct species. Seeds from different wild populations of the same species can carry different traits and respond differently to environmental conditions.
Understanding where seeds originated, their genetic diversity and the conditions in which they can successfully establish can be critical when selecting material for restoration. Kew scientists also highlight the importance of population-level differences, including local climate, site conditions and genetic variation, when sourcing seeds for restoration. Identifying appropriate material can currently involve searching across multiple organizations and sources to establish what seeds exist, whether they can be accessed and how to turn them into viable plants.
Making existing collections easier to discover could help practitioners rebuilding degraded habitats introduce genetic diversity into available seed sources, reduce reliance on a narrow pool of commercially available material and reveal important taxonomic or geographic gaps in collections. SeedPOD allows participating seed custodians to make their collections discoverable in one place, including: Elinor Breman, senior research leader for seed conservation at RBG Kew, says, "Countries around the world have committed to restoring degraded ecosystems on an unprecedented scale, but delivering on those ambitions ultimately depends on having the right native seeds, from appropriate and diverse sources, and knowing how to grow them successfully. "Seed banks hold an extraordinary resource and decades of knowledge, but much of that information is scattered between institutions or can be difficult to access.
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