The Living Archive: Building a National Seedbank for (threatened) wild plants in the Netherlands based upon scientific principles.

Daan Curwiel ¹, Sascha van der Meer ²

Floron, the Netherlands ¹, Floron ²

In light of the current biodiversity crisis, which is especially apparent in a strongly urbanised country like the Netherlands, many populations or even entire species have been disappearing from the landscape. Populations have been lost or have become smaller due to processes such as habitat fragmentation and habitat degradation. Resulting in loss of genetic diversity, which in turn can increase the risk of local extinction. To safeguard the standing genetic diversity of populations of wild plant species in the Netherlands a project was launched to collect and store seeds from all indigenous plant species in a National Seedbank. The project, The Living Archive, focusses on collecting and storing seeds of 530 threatened and endangered species which are mentioned on the national Red List (Sparrius et al. 2014). In addition, seeds of other indigenous species are also collected and stored in the National Seedbank. The project started in 2017 and in 2020 two provinces begun professionally collecting seeds of threatened and endangered plant species that are part of their botanical heritage. In 2025 half of all Dutch provinces will be participating in The Living Archive, conserving the genetic diversity of a large number of threatened and endangered wild plant species. To accommodate this project, a procedure for seed collection, processing and storage was created, based on scientific literature. In addition, a collaboration between seed collectors, researchers, local governments and nature conservation agencies was developed to streamline seed collection and processing while also improving communication between the various parties. Harvested seeds are first dried for at least 3 weeks, after which they are cleaned and sorted. Subsequently, half is kept in a humidity controlled refrigerator for germination trials and genetic research and the other half is stored in a different location at -20°C for long term storage. Germination trials have shown that the germination rate of nearly all species did not decline significantly after storage in the humidity controlled refrigerator, for up to six years. Furthermore, seeds from a select number of species have already been used in population reinforcements or reintroduction programmes in the Netherlands, which has shown that these efforts require a long term investment of effort, money and most of all sufficient amounts of seed. Since the start of the project in 2017, seeds of 474 indigenous species, including 276 threatened or endangered species, have been collected in at least one location in the Netherlands. However, a species is only considered completely safeguarded when it has been collected in five different locations on a national level, or three locations on a provincial level, so the work has only just begun.

Main author career stage: PhD student

Contribution type: Talk

First choice session: 3. Biodiversity and global change

Second choice session: 6. Plants, Fungi and Society