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<\/p>\nThe man in charge of logging each native seed in Ireland has described the project as like \u201cNoah\u2019s Ark\u201d for plants \u2013 a vault for renewal after ecological disasters.<\/p>\n
Conservation ecologist Darren Reidy has been researching, gathering and banking native seeds across Ireland since his appointment in 2022.<\/p>\n
\u2018Banking\u2019 the seeds of a native Irish plant is complicated \u2013 ideally you would need 10,000 seeds per species.<\/p>\n
If the plant is endangered, an assessment of all populations on the island is done to decide if it is safe to bank the species\u2019 seeds, and if it is, they can take only 10% of the fruit.<\/p>\n
Mr Reidy gave the example of critically endangered whitebeam trees that grow only in Ireland.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe only have five individuals of this species on the entire island, and they all occur in Killarney National Park in Kerry,\u201d he told the Press Association.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly one of them is producing fruit. So this summer, I travelled to Killarney to collect fruit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was only 40 fruit on the tree at the time, so obeying the 10% rule \u2013 which I have a licence for \u2013 I could only collect four fruit, and then when I opened those four fruits, there was only one viable seed inside of those four fruits.\u201d<\/p>\n
A decision was made to set up a seed bank in Ireland in 2019, after Ireland declared a climate and biodiversity emergency, with the aim of preserving the genetic diversity of the Irish flora.<\/p>\n
But thanks to the pandemic plans were stalled until 2022, when Mr Reidy was appointed by the Office of Public Works.<\/p>\n
His office at the herbarium at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin has plant encyclopaedias, microscopes, storage bags, two incubators and a freezer \u2013 which holds Ireland\u2019s seed bank.<\/p>\n
Mr Reidy said not much space is needed to bank all Irish seeds. To illustrate this, he takes out a matchbox which he said holds a single seed of all 900 native species to Ireland.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe only really have three big seed species, and those are the two oaks and the hazel, and then everything else is really tiny \u2013 the orchid seeds especially are like dust.\u201d<\/p>\n
Collected seeds are cleaned and dried to 15% relative humidity, which suits most species.<\/p>\n
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The seeds are then frozen at minus 20C for up to three months, and then a subset of that batch is tested to see if they germinate or if they do not, if they have pests or pathogens.<\/p>\n
If they do germinate, the seeds are frozen again at minus 20C and, depending on the species, can be viable for up to 200 years.<\/p>\n
As orchid and oak seeds do not like being dried, they need to be banked by being cryopreserved.<\/p>\n
The equipment to do this is going to be acquired and it can also be used by his colleagues to preserve ferns and mosses, which produce spores rather than seeds.<\/p>\n
Asked how difficult his seed-banking task is, he said: \u201cPerson power is the real limiting factor, because you have to be skilled at plant identification, and then the processing of the seed once it comes to the lab is really slow as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I think just because it\u2019s difficult, we shouldn\u2019t shy away from it \u2013 it\u2019s certainly achievable.\u201d<\/p>\n
He gives the example of the oyster plant, a coastal species which is vulnerable to extinction in Ireland and went extinct in England and Wales in the last century.<\/p>\n
The cold ocean water washing the seed onto the shore breaks the dormancy in the seed so it can germinate.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Ireland, it\u2019s just left on the Antrim coast and the Donegal coast. So this summer, I focused on this species, I collected the seed from every viable population in the Republic of Ireland, and so now I have that entire species banked for Ireland, because it was just maybe six or seven populations that I worked on really well.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said so far, he has gathered 137 different species, equivalent to 13% of Ireland\u2019s native and archaeophyte flora.<\/p>\n
He has focused on the more endangered plants where possible, and has banked 34 species of Ireland\u2019s threatened and near-threatened flora, equating to 15% of red-listed species.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe concept of seed banking is almost like a Noah\u2019s Ark style of conservation, where you are taking species from the wild and preserving them in a captivity of sorts should the worst-case scenario happen and we lose those species from the wild,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really important to have seed banking in the context of 21st century biodiversity loss, because we\u2019re losing our plant diversity at an ever-increasing scale.\u201d<\/p>\n
Currently, of around 1,100 species native to the island of Ireland, more than 100 are threatened with extinction and a further 100 are near threatened.<\/p>\n
The aim is to replant these species back in their natural habitats when they are ecologically restored.<\/p>\n
Mr Reidy cites two examples: one is a club sedge that grew at Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland before its extinction.<\/p>\n
A former director of the Botanics, David Moore, collected its seeds in the 1940s, before its extinction in the wild, and it is now in cultivation at Glasnevin where it is producing a lot of seed.<\/p>\n
The second is a sea cottonweed that was growing at Lady\u2019s Island Lake in Co Wexford, and was reduced to just 14 plants.<\/p>\n
Dr Noeleen Smyth and Edel McDonald, both formerly of Botanic Gardens, collected it, propagated it and reintroduced it at Lady\u2019s Island.<\/p>\n
But Mr Reidy said that seed banking alone will not prevent plants going extinct, and warns that attempts to reintroduce plants can fail.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou do need to look at how we manage our landscapes, use our natural resources and how we manage our habitats in Ireland, but the seed banking is like a cog in that bigger wheel of conservation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The man in charge of logging each native seed in Ireland has described the project as like \u201cNoah\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1664,615,246,61,60,107248,78563,43,107249,68425],"class_list":["post-203432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-conservation","tag-dublin","tag-environment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-national-botanics-of-ireland","tag-national-botanic-gardens","tag-news","tag-seed-banking","tag-seeds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}