Sydney Botanic Gardens has contributed to the Millennium Seed Bank project, a British-based initiative aiming to collect and conserve seeds from 10 per cent of the world's flowering plants by 2010.
The project, akin to Noah's Ark, is an insurance policy against mankind's pillaging of the planet’s natural habitats and resources.
"We are putting away seeds for a rainy day," explains Dr Paul Smith, leader of the Millennium Seed Bank project, who has just taken delivery of his 1,000th seed sample from Australia.
Australia's contribution is so significant because it is home to over 20,000 species, some one-tenth of the world's total, and contains one in seven globally threatened species.
The 1,000th Australian sample was the rare Acacia Pubescens, known as downy or hairy-stemmed wattle, a plant native to western Sydney which has been threatened by the city's expansion since World War II.
The scientists do not take just one seed from the Acacia Pubescens and other plants like it. The average is 32,000 seeds per collection. They are dried and frozen and stored in a nuclear-proof vault bigger than a football pitch 20 metres beneath the Sussex countryside, 50 km south of London.
"Nearly 2,000 of our rainforest species have seeds that are sensitive to drying out," said Dr Tim Entwistle, executive director of Sydney's Botanic Gardens Trust, which now has one-third of NSW flora in its seed bank. "We will have to examine other ways of preserving them, such as cryo-storage."
Dr Smith said land use remained the biggest threat to the diversity of plants.
"Clearing of natural vegetation accounts for 20 per cent of carbon emissions - more than the world's transport emissions - yet we still do it," he said. "It's a political problem - it's something we could stop tomorrow.
"I think a moratorium on deforestation is something the next climate change convention may well look for."
Dr Entwistle said plants affected every aspect of life.
"The air we breathe, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the furniture we sit on, there's no part of your life unaffected by plants," he said.
"Each one is a Mona Lisa, a unique product of evolution that has taken effectively 3.8 billion years to produce, and if you lose it you may not get it back again.
"Human beings have been here such a short time, and it's very courageous tinkering we are involved in... We don't yet understand what uses we may have for many plants... Why cut off our options?"
Dr Smith is also seeking funding for the next decade of his seed project to 2020.
(Original article sourced from ninemsn) |
