Global Seed Bank Goes Bananas

An unusual, pink variety of banana — reportedly a top menu choice of Asian elephants native to the same area as the banana — has allowed botanists to achieve a notable goal in their effort to preserve a record of the planet’s diversity of flora.

With the addition of the Musa itinerans seeds to the massive Millennial Seed Bank project underway at England’s Kew Gardens, those at work to keep hope alive for botanical biodiversity have passed the threshold of securing seeds for 10 percent of the plants known to mankind. That’s 24,200 species down, 217,800 (give or take) to go.

More than 100 organizations, representing more than 50 countries, are supporting the effort which now sets sights to meeting the goal of seed-banking 25 percent of the earth’s flowering plant species by the year 2020. The seeds for the pink banana found in China join a seed back comprised of some 1.7 billion individual seeds.

Selected for quality and viability, the specimens are dried, cleaned and stored at sub-freezing temperatures. The project represents an effort to ensure the future availability of the world’s plants should their survival become threatened by any manner of changing conditions on Earth.

Global food security challenges, impacts to biodiversity and a changing global climate all serve to inform and inspire the massive undertaking.

Kew Gardens director Stephen Hopper tells the BBC how the next phase of activity will unfold, and what the project aims to accomplish:

"In the next phase, we want to secure another 15%, so by 2020 we will have a quarter of the world's seeds banked in both the country of origin and Wakehurst Place. And a major focus is going to be a considerable expansion in the sustainable use of seeds for human benefit. The thing that has changed over this 10-year period [since the project got underway] is a much more acute awareness of climate change as a threatening process, as well as the many others that impact on plant life. And the seed bank, as an insurance strategy, is a good sensible way of keeping your options open for the future."

Photo courtesy of Adrian Pingstone, via Wikimedia Commons