A seed of doubt

Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank has soft-launched SeedPOD, the Seed Portal for Online Data, a platform intended to make information about native seed collections, their availability and their propagation easier to find. The ambition is to tackle one of the persistent bottlenecks in ecological restoration: getting the right seed, from the right source, to the right place.

It is an interesting development, and one that fits into a broader restoration workflow I explored in an earlier post on restoration and digital tools. There is another tool that could usefully complement it: the RHS Garden Climate Assessment Tool (GCAT).

The idea is to connect three stages of a practical restoration exercise. First, identify a native species appropriate to the planting location. Then find out whether seed is available from the Millennium Seed Bank or another seed supplier. Finally, check whether the species is likely to remain climatically suitable at the planting site under future climate scenarios. If all goes well, obtain the seed and grow the plants.

I decided to try this with Markhamia obtusifolia, an indigenous African tree that might be an interesting addition to my garden in Nairobi.

The first stop was SeedPOD. Here I found a bit of a discrepancy. The older Millennium Seed Bank seed list website listed three accessions: one from Malawi and two from Botswana. The new SeedPOD interface showed just one accession, held by IIAM (Instituto de Investigação Agrária de Moçambique) in Maputo, and apparently the only one currently available. It is not clear whether this reflects a change in the underlying holdings, a difference in what the two databases display, or simply a difference in how availability is recorded. Either way, it raises a question about how complete and up to date the new interface is.

There was a little more information from BGCI’s PlantSearch, accessible through SeedPOD, which identified 15 ex situ sites holding the species. That suggests that the tree is represented in a reasonable number of living collections, although it does not tell us whether any of them can supply seed. BTW, the links from SeedPOD to GBIF and Genesys did not work when I tried them, and I could not find the promised list of seed suppliers either. So the next step in the workflow — actually finding some seed — remains elusive. (ChatGPT could not find any seed suppliers in Nairobi though it did flag a couple of plausible options for M. lutea.)

At least the climate assessment was more straightforward. Using GCAT, I was able to establish that M. obtusifolia should be climatically suitable for planting in Nairobi under most climate change scenarios. This is a useful check, although it does not settle questions of soil, provenance, or other ecological requirements. Climate suitability is not quite the same thing as ecological suitability.

None of this diminishes the value of SeedPOD’s underlying ambition. Bringing together information previously dispersed information is worthwhile. But the real test is whether a user can move easily and quickly from a species name to a viable source of seed, assess its suitability for a particular restoration site, and eventually get plants into the ground.

My little experiment has not quite completed that journey. SeedPOD helped identify ex situ holdings, and GCAT provided a positive climate-suitability assessment. But the route from a database record to an actual packet of seed is still surprisingly difficult to navigate. A platform intended to connect seed conservation with ecological restoration will ultimately be judged not just by how much information it brings together, but by whether people can use it to get seed into the ground.