UK's Millenium Seed Bank Racing Against Time, Climate Change - Reuters

[hatrack]

LONDON, Sept 12 (Reuters) - Thousands of plant species are being pushed to the brink of extinction by global warming, and those already at the extremes are in the greatest danger, a leading botanist said on Tuesday. Paul Smith, head of Britain's Millennium Seed Bank, said the drylands of the world which cover 40 percent of the earth's surface and are home to more than one-third of the population faced the bleakest future.

"In the southern hemisphere the plants can either go up or south. But in South Africa's Cape they can't do either, so the 8,000 unique species of fijnbos (indigenous vegetation) there are a real worry," he told Reuters on a visit to London's Kew Gardens. Smith's team is on target to have sorted and stored seeds from 10 percent of the world's plant species by 2010 in a race against time as global temperatures rise due to burning fossil fuels for transport and power.

"The trouble is that when we started collecting it was generally agreed that there were 242,000 plant species. But now some people believe it could be as high as 400,000.

"We really need to find out just what is out there before it has gone forever," he said, noting that on Robinson Crusoe island off Chile scientists found there had been eight extinctions in just the past decade.

EDIT

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L12778030.htm

[jwirr]

1. Do we have a program like this in the USA?

[hatrack]

2. The USDA's seed bank, but for decades, the man who ran it had dyslexia

This led to certain, shall we say, complications when he retired and new employees had to go in and reorganize/reclassify the stored seeds when they updated the facility.

No, I am not making this up.

There are a couple of well-known organizations that save heirlooms and landrace seeds here;

http://www.seedsavers.org/

and

http://www.nativeseeds.org/v2/default.php

but there are many more. Check out

http://homepage.eircom.net/~merlyn/seedsaving.html

for businesses and foundations which do the same thing.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. "Complications"? No shit...

Imagine getting that job: You have a box of seeds labled 'pure jin', and all you know about them is they were between the 'drowned woad' and the 'spiny creeps'. Hours of fun...

(Hint: Cupressaceae) :)