Seeds of Hopelessness

[jtuck004]

...
"Can seed banks adequately prepare for the future if wild plant populations are already lagging behind in adapting to rapid climate change?"


In 2006, plant geneticist Johanna Schmitt, then of Brown University, and her colleagues set out on a massive gardening experiment that would span four countries and come to include thousands of Arabidopsis thaliana plants, millions of fruit specimens, and a lot of chocolate chip cookies. In gardens in Finland, Germany, England, and Spain, Schmitt’s team sowed Arabidopsis seeds collected from all over Europe and Asia—from as far afield as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and eastern Russia to sites in Western Europe and Scandinavia. The researchers were testing which seeds would fare best when grown in each of the four countries. (The cookies were later used to incentivize Brown undergraduates to manually count the small, cigar-shape fruits that grew in the garden...

But Schmitt’s study showed what others had speculated: that climate change was already happening too quickly for evolution to keep up (PNAS, 111 906–13, 2014).

...The results may mean that conservation efforts that employ seed banking for preservation or reintroduction face an extra challenge in anticipating and accommodating adaptation lag. For instance, if seeds had been collected decades earlier from a particular population that has since fallen behind in its adaptation to the climate, a reintroduction project might be doomed. “What our results suggest is there’s some value in preserving genetic variety from across the species range,” says Schmitt.

“In theory, it would be possible; in practice, it’s probably unachievable because of the huge effort,” says Wolfgang Stuppy, a seed morphologist at the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership at the Royal Botanic Gardens in the U.K. The partnership is the largest conservation program of its kind in the world, aiming to bank 75,000 plant species—25 percent of the world’s flora—by 2020. Collecting such a massive number of species is a mammoth project in itself, and multiplying it to include a variety of regional genotypes is not feasible, he says.

...

Here.

In other words, one of the things we are depending on for our survival may very well not work. Time for Plan B.