'It's like Noah's Ark' - Man logs every native Irish seed

A conservation ecologist who is in charge of logging each native seed in Ireland has described the project as like "Noah's Ark" for plants - a vault for renewal after ecological disasters.

Dr Darren Reidy has been researching, gathering and banking native seeds across Ireland since his appointment in 2022.

'Banking' the seeds of a native Irish plant is complicated - ideally you would need 10,000 seeds per species.

If the plant is endangered, an assessment of all populations on the island is done to decide if it is safe to bank the species' seeds, and if it is, they can take only 10% of the fruit.

Mr Reidy gave the example of critically endangered whitebeam trees that grow only in Ireland.

"We only have five individuals of this species on the entire island, and they all occur in Killarney National Park in Kerry," he told the Press Association.

"Only one of them is producing fruit. So this summer, I travelled to Killarney to collect fruit.

"There was only 40 fruit on the tree at the time, so obeying the 10% rule - which I have a licence for - I could only collect four fruit, and then when I opened those four fruits, there was only one viable seed inside of those four fruits."

A decision was made to set up a seed bank in Ireland in 2019, after Ireland declared a climate and biodiversity emergency, with the aim of preserving the genetic diversity of the Irish flora.

But thanks to the pandemic plans were stalled until 2022, when Mr Reidy was appointed by the Office of Public Works.

His office at the herbarium at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin has plant encyclopaedias, microscopes, storage bags, two incubators and a freezer - which holds Ireland's seed bank.

Mr Reidy said not much space is needed to bank all Irish seeds. To illustrate this, he takes out a matchbox which he said holds a single seed of all 900 native species to Ireland.

"We only really have three big seed species, and those are the two oaks and the hazel, and then everything else is really tiny - the orchid seeds especially are like dust."

Collected seeds are cleaned and dried to 15% relative humidity, which suits most species.

The seeds are then frozen at -20C for up to three months, and then a subset of that batch is tested to see if they germinate or if they do not, if they have pests or pathogens.

If they do germinate, the seeds are frozen again at -20C and, depending on the species, can be viable for up to 200 years.

As orchid and oak seeds do not like being dried, they need to be banked by being cryopreserved.

The equipment to do this is going to be acquired and it can also be used by his colleagues to preserve ferns and mosses, which produce spores rather than seeds.

Asked how difficult his seed-banking task is, he said: "Person power is the real limiting factor, because you have to be skilled at plant identification, and then the processing of the seed once it comes to the lab is really slow as well.

"But I think just because it's difficult, we shouldn't shy away from it - it's certainly achievable."

He gives the example of the oyster plant, a coastal species which is vulnerable to extinction in Ireland and went extinct in England and Wales in the last century.

The cold ocean water washing the seed onto the shore breaks the dormancy in the seed so it can germinate.

"In Ireland, it's just left on the Antrim coast and the Donegal coast. So this summer, I focused on this species, I collected the seed from every viable population in the Republic of Ireland, and so now I have that entire species banked for Ireland, because it was just maybe six or seven populations that I worked on really well."

He said so far, he has gathered 137 different species, equivalent to 13% of Ireland's native and archaeophyte flora.

He has focused on the more endangered plants where possible, and has banked 34 species of Ireland's threatened and near-threatened flora, equating to 15% of red-listed species.

"The concept of seed banking is almost like a Noah's Ark style of conservation, where you are taking species from the wild and preserving them in a captivity of sorts should the worst-case scenario happen and we lose those species from the wild," he said.

"It's really important to have seed banking in the context of 21st century biodiversity loss, because we're losing our plant diversity at an ever-increasing scale."

Currently, of around 1,100 species native to the island of Ireland, more than 100 are threatened with extinction and a further 100 are near threatened.

The aim is to replant these species back in their natural habitats when they are ecologically restored.

Mr Reidy cites two examples: one is a club sedge that grew at Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland before its extinction.

A former director of the Botanics, David Moore, collected its seeds in the 1940s, before its extinction in the wild, and it is now in cultivation at Glasnevin where it is producing a lot of seed.

The second is a sea cottonweed that was growing at Lady's Island Lake in Co Wexford, and was reduced to just 14 plants.

Dr Noeleen Smyth and Edel McDonald, both formerly of Botanic Gardens, collected it, propagated it and reintroduced it at Lady's Island.

But Mr Reidy said that seed banking alone will not prevent plants going extinct, and warns that attempts to reintroduce plants can fail.

"You do need to look at how we manage our landscapes, use our natural resources and how we manage our habitats in Ireland, but the seed banking is like a cog in that bigger wheel of conservation," he said.