Missouri Botanical Garden

The Missouri Botanical Garden will carry out a project to enhance stewardship of its seed bank collections that support plant conservation. The seed bank contains three core collections and currently holds more than 2,000 samples representing 845 different species, of which 158 are globally rare or threatened. The objectives of this project are to: acquire and install new equipment, including an x-ray machine and germination incubators; assess baseline seed quality through non-destructive inspection of seeds; and monitor seed collection viability through germination tests to ensure collection longevity and sustainability. The seed bank collections serve a wide audience, enabling educational displays of rare plants at the botanical garden, as well as sharing of data with the greater plant conservation science community on the publicly searchable database, www.livingcollections.org.