Allie Howell

Springtime has us thinking about the magic of seeds. They hold all the material needed to start a new plant—DNA, food and the start of new leaves and a root—all within a convenient, compact package. For many species, their durable coat offers them protection from the elements while they await suitable conditions to set down roots. Some seeds can withstand fire, icy winters, or the highly acidic environment of an animal’s digestive system. These characteristics also make seeds ideal for us to store in Rare Care’s Miller Seed Vault.

Storing seeds is especially important for rare species in case we need to expand or restore populations. A new population may need to be introduced where the species never existed or returned to an area where a population once existed. To do this, we need seed from wild populations living in a variety of conditions so that the introduced population has a range of traits that could be helpful for adapting to a new habitat.

To ensure we preserve a species’ genetic diversity in the Miller Seed Vault, we try to collect seeds from many individuals, ideally from every population, without depleting the seed of the wild populations. We follow the Center for Plant Conservation’s guidelines that recommend collections take no more than 10% of the population’s seed, and no more than 10% of seeds from an individual plant. Seeds from each mother plant (“maternal line”) are held in separate envelopes to track how many maternal lines are present in the seed vault collection. Seeds are cleaned, logged and stored separately by maternal line.

Our top priorities for seed banking include federally threatened or endangered species and species endemic to the Pacific Northwest because species with smaller, more localized distributions are more vulnerable to loss. Currently, we are working on expanding the population of Umtanum desert buckwheat (Eriogonum codium), a federally threatened species found only at one site on Umtanum Ridge, near Richland, WA. It is threatened by wildfires and climate change. Establishing other populations nearby helps ensure the species can persist in the event the fire-prone ridge burns.

The Miller Seed Vault holds seed collections from more than 70 maternal lines of the Umtanum desert buckwheat. Derby Canyon Natives, a plant nursery in Peshastin, maintains a seed-increase bed for the species, to which we’ve added 16 maternal lines to date. The ample seed we get in return is used to grow and plant plugs on another ridge near the native population.

This spring we will water and monitor the plugs we planted in fall of 2023 and 2024 and use them to study how to mitigate drought and temperature stress to help more plugs survive their first summer at the new site.
This fall we will plant more seedlings to continue increasing the introduced population. If you are interested in helping, please watch your email for volunteer opportunities or email rarecare@uw.edu to get more information about how to volunteer.