UC Berkeley Botanical Garden houses crucial seed bank to preserve biodiversity
By Molly McCrea
Above the main campus at the University of California, Berkeley, nestled in Strawberry Canyon at the Botanical Gardens, you’ll find a critically important bank. It doesn’t store hordes of cash or glittering gold bullion. This bank stores seeds.
“So, we have millions of seeds represented from hundreds of different species from rare and endangered plants and they are all meticulously curated,” explained curator and conservation officer Clare Loughran.
The seeds are stored in a vault at 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Most of the seeds stored in the deep freeze come from plants native to the Golden State.
“These plants have been here for thousands of years, and they’re going extinct at an extremely high rate,” Loughran said.
Seed banks are a way to guard against extinction and to preserve biodiversity. The stored seeds serve as an insurance policy against crop failure, catastrophic wars, and environmental disasters, including those created by climate change.
“Climate change is not just extreme drought,” Loughran noted. “It’s also fire. It’s these other kinds of catastrophes that can happen in an instant.”
The Berkeley Seed Bank is one of approximately 1,700 banks worldwide. The largest wild seed collection is held in the United Kingdom at The Millennium Seed Bank, run by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
This year, the Millennium Seed Bank, located at Wakehurst in Sussex, England, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. In 2000, King Charles III, then the Prince of Wales, opened the facility.
The bank’s vault is built underground and houses more than 2.5 billion seeds, including 800 duplicate seed collections from California.
“The majority of our collections are within this room,” said David Hickmott, seed curator at the Royal Botanic Gardens. “The room isn’t humidity-controlled, but it is at minus 20 degrees Celsius. All of our collections are in glass jars or foil bags to make sure they’re hermetically sealed, and we’re currently standing in possibly the world’s most biodiverse place.”
Before any seeds are banked, they need to be cleaned, dried, and tested. Some arrive buried in fruit. UC Botanical Garden assistant curator Sophie Warsh showed CBS News Bay Area some berries soaking in a shallow bowl of water. The berries, produced by a native dogwood in California, contain the seeds. Each fruit contains about 50 to 100 seeds.
“They need to be soaked in water for several hours, and then we’re going to put them in this mesh bag to clean the fruit and get to the seeds,” explained Warsh.
The UC Botanical Garden is a member of California Plant Rescue, a network of about a dozen seed banks in the state. The goal is to conserve the genetic diversity of California’s rarest plants, in part, by banking their seeds. The seeds can be held in the seed banks for decades, with the hope they won’t need to be withdrawn anytime soon. They provide a safeguard for the future.
