Matters of Interest

South Australian Seed Conservation Centre

The Hon. R.B. MARTIN (15:21): I was pleased to attend an event last month put on by the Friends of the Parliamentary Library, a talk by Professor Michelle Waycott, Chief Botanist at the State Herbarium of South Australia. Following on from Professor Waycott's fascinating presentation, I would like to tell you a bit about the valuable and important role the South Australian Seed Conservation Centre plays in our state's environment and the conservation of its native plants.

The Seed Conservation Centre was established in 2002 by the Adelaide Botanic Gardens and the State Herbarium. In plain terms, they collect, store and regrow seeds to safeguard our threatened and vulnerable native flora against extinction. There are currently 3,503 different species represented within the seed collections of the Seed Conservation Centre.

Over the 21-year operation, that number averages out to 166 unique species collected each year. They undertake field expeditions to the remote corners of our state, travelling right across our significant land mass to search for plant species and collect their seeds. As of September 2021, 84 per cent of South Australia's threatened flora were included in the seed bank. It is incredible to think that you can have over 3,500 unique species represented and not have collected them all yet. It is like playing a time-sensitive, Sisyphean Pokémon game, where the higher stakes include the threat of permanent extinction.

It is not as simple as just collecting and storing the seeds: the Seed Conservation Centre is involved in research, redistribution and revegetation efforts across the state. The data they maintain is accessible to the public through the Seeds of South Australia website. The centre is also building an image database, which thus far includes high resolution scientific images of 197 different types of seeds. This database as well can be viewed by anyone and the images are fascinating.

The Conservation Centre is a member of the Australian National Seed Bank Partnership, which is an alliance of 15 different organisations, including 10 conservation seed banks across Australia, in partnership with the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens in the UK. The Millennium Seed Bank is the world's largest underground bank of seeds from wild plants, holding 2.4 billion seeds from over 39,000 different species. Do yourself a favour and Google image search the Millennium Seed Bank, because its underground facility looks like it is straight out of a James Bond film.

Here at home, the South Australian Seed Conservation Centre makes crucial scientific and environmental contributions that benefit our whole state and its ecosystems. The Seed Conservation Centre was a major project partner of the Nature Conservation Society of South Australia in the post-bushfire recovery efforts on Kangaroo Island, including re-establishing the rare plant garden in Cygnet Park in 2022, which nurtures more than 60 different plant species. They assisted with the repopulation of the De Mole River Correa, which only grows along that river on Kangaroo Island—an area greatly impacted by the fires.

Although a small number of plants began to regrow, they were unfortunately washed away with the intense summer rainfall event that occurred soon after. Thankfully, the Seed Conservation Centre had preserved seeds from that plant in 2016 and successfully propagated the plant in Adelaide before 40 specimens were planted back along the river on Kangaroo Island—quite amazing stuff.

The Seed Conservation Centre was also crucial to the recovery of the Clover Glycine in the Adelaide Hills after the 2019-20 bushfires. In April 2022, the conservation centre recalled 250 of the 1,200 Clover Glycine seeds they had sent years earlier to the Millennium Seed Bank in the underground facility in the UK. Two hundred and thirty plants were successfully propagated for planting in the bushfire affected area in 2021.

This is only a glimpse of the phenomenal work that the Seed Conservation Centre does. I would love more South Australians to be engaged with this important area of science. I am very glad to have learned more about it, and I wholeheartedly commend the Seed Conservation Centre for all the work they do for South Australia.