I don't think a lot of people think about seeds as living creatures but
that's exactly what they are.
They encapsulate a future generation.
That seed enables that plant, that plant population, to persist beyond just that individual.
Collecting and banking seed is important in the context of plant conservation because it
essentially retains the genetic diversity of that population that you have collected from.
The banking of seed can allow for future research to be conducted on that particular species.
Banking that seed allows for reintroduction of populations that are destroyed.
Populations can be destroyed through man-made causes or through natural catastrophes,
but if we have a backup of that population in the form of the seed, then we can reintroduce that population
back into the wild at some later point.
When we are making a seed collection for conservation purposes,
we want to capture all of the genetic diversity.
These seeds are going to be used at some point in the future
and we don't have control over the weather or even the soil.
And so we hope that some of those seeds will have some resistance to whatever that adverse condition is.
One of the species that was a target for me was Malvastrum aurantiacum
or commonly known as Wright's false mallow.
That had been mentioned as a common species in the area about 80 years earlier
and when we started looking for that, we simply could not find it.
And we could not purchase the seeds, they were not commercially available.
And so for a long time, that stayed on my list of species to look for.
So this species occurs in just a portion of Texas - three of the eco-regions.
Texas Blackland Prairie, the Edwards Plateau, the Western Gulf Coastal Plain.
In some years, those three regions experience really dry times.
Most of the wildflowers will just go dormant.
But the Wright's false mallow is one of the few species that is producing pollen in the driest time of the year.
And so for those solitary bees that are collecting pollen that can make the difference for them.
During the process of seed collection, you need to wait for seeds to mature in a population,
you need to collect the seed, you need to clean the seed,
and then store it and retain all the information that goes along with that collection.
Once you have found a potential target that you would like to collect,
you want to contact the landowner or the land manager
and ask permission to come onto that site and to make the seed collection.
That first trip you're really just trying to get a sense of what species are at that site and the extent of the site.
The next step is really to make sure that you know what your species is!
That you have a correct identification and that you know what its conservation status is.
The conservation status will determine whether you collect those seeds by seed parent
and store by seed parent or whether you collect in bulk.
When you're collecting rare plants, you want to always retain the seeds from one individual together.
Whereas for common species, you can take all the seeds and throw them into one bag.
Additionally, when you're collecting rare plant seeds, if you know that the population will hopefully persist into the future,
you want to facilitate the ability of that population to persist, so you don't want to collect very many seeds.
The rule of thumb is collecting less than 10 percent of the seeds from a population in a year.
Whereas for common species, you can collect many more than 10 percent,
unless you know that the rare plant population will be destroyed in the near future
and then you can collect more seed.
Ideally, we want to collect as many seeds as we can before, you know, the bulldozers arrive or whatever it is.
But we still want to be able to keep those separate by seed parents
so we have to have some way to mark them.
And so when the target is a rare species, you're going to flag each individual plant
and you keep up with how many fruit you collect so that you will know those plants.
The part that takes the longest is just monitoring the population.
And so what I would try to do is like once a week be able to walk past it,
check to see if it's still flowering, you know once it stops flowering,
you know you start kind of zeroing in on how long you think it'll be 'till it has mature fruit.
It's hard to predict how long it will take from the time when you see those flowers to a time when you have mature fruit.
It depends somewhat on the weather.
I don't ever want to collect the first fruit,
but I want to be there pretty quickly after that to start collecting.
But I always want to let some seeds get back in the environment any given year.
It's just a way to make sure that you're protecting the population
and that you're collecting mature fruit when you actually collect.
So what I usually do is I just kind of look at it quickly and see the fruit that looks the best.
It should pull off really easily. If it doesn't pull off, then it's probably not good.
We'll look and see that that calyx doesn't have any small holes in it.
Those seeds look good. That's it.
It does not take any special equipment to make a seed collection.
If you think about it, we have been collecting seeds for thousands and thousands of years,
but you will have more success if you remember that those seeds are alive.
And so you want to make sure that whatever you put the fruit into or the seeds into,
that material, it allows air to circulate around the fruit and the seeds.
After we have made that seed collection, we're going to process the seeds.
We remove the insects and the frass.
We really just want to store very clean seeds.
We're going to store it for maybe a week or two over silica gel
and then we can put the seeds in some sort of waterproof container.
It can be something as simple as a mason jar.
And then we need a freezer, a standard household freezer is fine.
The vast majority of species can be seed banked.
The process of seed banking, however, can kill some seeds.
They become non-viable and that's because seed banking requires refrigeration or freezing and that dries out seeds.
And that is a good thing for desiccation-tolerant seeds
but it is a very bad thing for species that are desiccation sensitive,
where the process of cooling them dries them out to a point where they can no longer survive
and those species have to be conserved in a living collection.
A living collection is any curated, documented collection of plants.
With proper documentation, any planting can be a living collection.
We always knew we wanted to have a collection of the oak species of Texas.
Oak seeds are acorns.
They're large fatty seeds.
You can't dry that seed out to the extent that it needs to be dried out.
The water in that seed will freeze, form ice crystals, and it will kill the embryo.
In order to conserve them, we need to have a living collection of plants that will serve
as a seed source for the future.
You know in 2015, I got some information from a colleague in West Texas that several oak species
that I had been watching from afar were fruiting right then.
In about 48 hours, I was out in West Texas to go collect these trees.
We already had a permit established with Big Bend National Park.
We were able to just go out there, make the collections over three days, and come back.
And that year we got about 11 oak species from West Texas.
In some situations we've gone to collect from five oak species
and only one of those species has acorns
and so you know we do the best we can,
we try to sample from that whole geographic range of that plant.
You know, over the course of the trip, I try to keep them cool.
We transport them back, they're each assigned individual collection numbers.
Usually we'll put them in a little bit of moist sawdust, put them in the fridge, and hope to sow them fairly quickly after that collection.
They don't all come up, sometimes they do all come up.
They die off in the nursery, they die off as young plants.
We will keep as many plants from that collection as possible.
We will grow them in the nursery for probably about three years.
Each tree will be irrigated, mulched, and caged upon planting
and that gives them probably their best chance of survival.
The assumption is, what if we do have a die off of all the oaks in Big Bend National Park?
And so having backup, this is your backup,
you can't have a seed bank, so you you have a living collection.
Even a tree like a live oak, you know, we think of those as common
but you know, we can't take these things for granted.
What's common today may not be common a hundred years from now.
In most of Texas, the rate of development is just very rapid.
Even some of the plants that would have been very common here 50 years ago
are becoming more and more uncommon.
Ideally we would be able to preserve enough habitat to have robust populations of these species.
Sometimes that is just simply not possible.
It's possible that the only way we can save that species is to seed bank it
and hopefully restore the habitat or find similar habitat where the species can be grown out.
Collaboration is critical to our success in this work. There's no parameters for that.
It's members of the public, it's other botanists from around the state and the country and the world really.
Conserving plants in Texas is a team effort and it is going to take many teams
because Texas is a big state, and there are many native plants
but it is not impossible.
If every group that is interested in native plants, whether it's a garden club or a butterfly club,
if each one of them would take one species and make a seed collection this year
to share with the members in their group and their local schools,
we could make sure that many species that are endemic don't end up being Species of Greatest Conservation Need.
And honestly, just going out and exploring and documenting plant occurrences and populations on iNaturalist,
learning about plants, what's rare,
documenting those things, that adds to our knowledge of plants in our local communities.
The more we know about rare and common species in the state of Texas or in our own counties,
the better prepared we can be to conserve and protect these species.