The Miller Seed Vault will reach a major milestone in 2026: our chest freezer, purchased in 2002 when the facility opened, will be filled. The freezer, securely situated within the 4-hour fire-rated walls of the seed vault, protects over 1.1 million seeds of 160 rare native plants of Washington. Compiling this collection took thousands of hours and in-kind contributions of volunteers, donors, staff, and conservation partners.

When we first started collecting seeds back in 2003, seed banking as a conservation tool was not widely appreciated nor prioritized. Nonetheless, botanic gardens across the country started adding seed banks, understanding that a time would come when these collections are needed to restore rare native plant populations.

Fast forward to today, and seed banking has taken on a new urgency. We routinely see conservation and restoration planning documents explicitly prioritize preserving wild-collected seed at the Center for Plant Conservation (CPC)-affiliated seed banks such as the Miller Seed Vault. This shift stems from the noticeable changes observed and measured in our climate and ecosystems. For instance, just in the past 30 years, over 2.5 million acres of forest have burned in the East Cascades. In the shrub-steppe ecosystem, big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata)-dominated plant communities have been converted to cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum)-dominated grasslands due to repeated wildfires that are too frequent to allow the sagebrush to reestablish. The toll on our native flora has been significant.

Recognizing the impact that repeated wildfires are causing in the arid west, the National Park Service and Department of the Interior (DOI) launched a multi-state effort to conserve seeds of rare plants found in fire-prone ecosystems. Rare Care leads this effort in Washington State in partnership with CPC. We have a target list of 30 species found on DOI land in the Columbia Basin, with a goal of collecting seeds from two populations of each species. Last year, we made 13 collections at National Wildlife Refuges and Bureau of Land Management lands.

This year, our goal is to complete another 47 collections. This is a significant challenge and will easily exceed the most collections added to the seed vault in a year, which currently stands at 29. As we said, we are going to need a new freezer.