Native Seed Bank Project
Building a native seedbank hub for the Northern Rivers
Capacity building - LEP23 - 033- LLC
The issue
One of the challenges we face in the future is the impact of natural disasters on landscapes and communities. Not having enough genetically diverse (genetically resilient) native seed stock will create a lack of strong native seed stock reserve to help supply restoration projects across the Tweed to help regenerate sites after natural disasters like floods and fire. Landcarers are passionate about helping support biodiversity conservation and revegetation projects through preservation of native species. Being able to use local native seed stock to supply future revegetation projects across the Tweed, Byron and Ballina Shires of NSW will mean that seed stock sourced will be more resilient to these local climates and will sustain the species that are found in those ecosystems and support the habitats of local fauna.
The solution
The North Coast Regional Landcare Seedbank project, supported by North Coast regional Landcare in partnership with North Coast Local Land Services, is about creating a reliable and locally sourced supply of native seeds to support environmental restoration, build climate resilience, and enable a more effective response to natural disasters across the North Coast NSW region. Tweed Landcare is one of 5 regional Landcare networks on the North Coast Region of NSW helping to achieve this vision through training volunteers to in seed collection, processing, storage and supply of native plant seed to a Central Native Seed storage facility (North Coast Regional Seedbank) located at the Coffs Harbour North Coast Regional Botanic Gardens. Continued education and training has been central to building volunteer knowledge and confidence that is needed for building a self-sustaining group of seed collectors and processors undertaking best-practice seed collection and processing. In order to facilitate this vision, we have been reaching out to volunteer seedbank collaborators over the past 6 months to undertake a series of successful seed collection and processing workshops. We have also established a partnership with a local nursery located in Mooball who has helped supply us with a shed space to undertake processing workshops with knowledgeable seed collectors and educators.
The impact
The benefits of this project so far have included:
- Biodiversity conservation through collection and storage of diverse native seed stock from across the Northern Rivers region of NSW
- Supporting community knowledge of seed collection and processing
- Providing local nurseries with seed supply to support propagation of a variety of locally native species
- Supporting supply of native seed stock to help bolster disaster recovery efforts (e.g. supporting future re-seeding of areas affected by landslides or bushfires), future revegetation and carbon sequestration projects across the region through our collective seed collection and processing efforts
- A continuation of liaison and networking with seedbank collaborators
Key facts
- Key challenges and learnings:
- Finding volunteers with existing knowledge: Finding those in the community with existing knowledge on plant ID, seed ID and whereabouts of seed stock in the local area who have the time to dedicate to leading seedbank volunteers can be challenging.
- Need for consistent Education: educating seed collectors to be ‘collection ready’ is time intensive. Most come with a lack of adequate knowledge required to collect seed at the right time and require support to collect from the right places according to best practice seed collection methods.
- Adoption of technology: Using Apps such as Inaturalist can make plant ID and seed ID a simple task for those who want to engage with the technology. For some volunteers, learning a new technology is discouraging and there extra educational resources are required to ensure diverse members of the community can learn Plant and Seed ID required to fully engage with this project.