7. REQUESTING SPECIES FOR COLLECTION

Seeds of Success is a large national program with partners from many different groups including the BLM with twenty or more collecting teams, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Chicago Botanic Garden, New York Department of Parks and Recreation’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center, New England Wild Flower Society, North Carolina Botanical Garden, and the Zoological Society of San Diego.  In the first year of the program there were 23 different teams in the United States collecting species for Seeds of Success.  Because RBG, Kew would like to minimize costs from duplication of species sent to the Millennium Seed Bank, all collectors, including BLM and SOS Partners, should coordinate with the SOS National Collections Data Manager for tracking species’ assignments.  This is best done via e-mail to mary_byrne@blm.gov.

Single species collections sent to the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew are the first of 20 collections needed for researchers to develop seed transfer zones for restoration species.  Each team should be working from a regional restoration target list.  Regional restoration target lists should be compiled with federal land managers, native plant materials development and conservation researchers, and any other native plant stakeholders.

The Seeds of Success website has a searchable database of the species in need of collecting and accessions recorded (current inventory) available on the website (http://www.nps.gov/plants/sos).  Use the website before requesting species to make sure the species is not already assigned or collected.  Contact Mary to request a subset of data, which can aid in compiling a unique target list and building on existing collections.  Teams may make multiple collections of species on their restoration target list, but not specifically assigned to them for shipment to MSB, so long as they are capturing unique populations in each collection (accession).  Species should not be collected if listed as G1, G2, or S1, S2 in the state in which they are being targeted.

Requests to collect species should be sent in the form of an Excel spreadsheet.  Column A is used by the national coordinator to identify the collecting group assigned.  Columns B, C, D, and E represent the taxonomic family, genus, specific epithet (species), and subspecies or variety respectively.  Column F is the NRCS PLANTS database symbol and column G is a common name for the plant.

Each species may be marked in as many ecoregions as it has been identified in and this information will be included in the data accessible on the Seeds of Success website (http://www.nps.gov/plants/sos/species).

**Collectors sending the single collection of a species to RBG, Kew Millennium Seed Bank are assigned all occurrences of the requested species in the database, regardless of variety or subspecies.

Species requests are assigned to collecting teams in the order in which the requests are received.  If a collecting team does not collect all of the species assigned to them by the end of the collecting year, the species will remain on the collector’s list until it is collected or traded to another collector.  Collectors interested in collecting a species for the Millennium Seed Bank on another collector’s list should initiate the swap by contacting the assigned collector and when the exchange is finalized, forward Mary the other team’s confirmation e-mail.