LONDON : Botanists at Britain’s Kew Gardens have collected seeds from 10% of the world’s wild plants, their first goal in a long-term project to protect all endangered species, they said on Thursday.
Seeds from a wild, pink banana are among the latest additions to the collection at Kew, London, designed to guard against dwindling diversity. The banana from China, musa itinerans, is an important staple for wild elephants and is also useful for breeding new types of the fruit, but is under threat as its jungle habitat is cleared for commercial agriculture.
It became the 24,200th species of wild plant with seeds stored in the Millennium Seed Bank, a nine-year-old conservation project run by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and institutions in 54 countries.
With it the project reaches its target to collect, bank and conserve seeds from 10% of the world’s most under-threat wild plant species — it is already working towards a new goal of 25% of plants by 2020.
The seed partnership focuses on collecting those plants most at risk and storing them sfor future use in conservation or for research. Since 2000, more than 3.5 billion seeds have been collected and stored in air-tight containers in the temperature-controlled vaults.
source:www.aaj.tv
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