At Wakehurst in Sussex, the Millennium Seed Bank holds more than 2.5 billion seeds from over 40,000 wild plant species. Yet finding the right native seed—and learning how to grow it—can still mean searching through scattered records and databases. On Oct. 13, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, launched SeedPOD, a free, open-access platform designed to bring that information together.
The challenge matters because restoring damaged habitats depends on more than planting any seed of the right species. Wild populations of the same plant can have different traits and respond differently to local conditions. Choosing seeds from suitable, varied sources can help restoration projects match plants to the places where they need to grow. But researchers at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank have identified limited access to suitable native seed as a continuing obstacle.
The need is growing. Under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, countries have committed to putting at least 30% of degraded land, inland waters, coasts and marine ecosystems under effective restoration by 2030. Seed banks conserve a vast store of wild plant diversity, but details about what they hold, where seeds came from, whether they are available and viable, and how to make them sprout are often spread across separate institutions and scientific papers.
SeedPOD, developed by Kew scientists, is meant to make those records easier to find. Participating seed banks and other seed custodians can share where wild seeds were collected and whether they are available and viable. The platform also brings together information about successful germination, including the conditions seeds need, how they become dormant and how they behave in storage. Standardized details about plant species and their traits can make collections from different institutions easier to compare.
That could help restoration practitioners, researchers, land managers and communities choose seed suited to a particular project. It may also help them find genetic diversity beyond a narrow range of commercially available seeds, while making gaps in collections—such as missing species or regions—more visible. SeedPOD is designed to include smaller seed banks and seed custodians, too, even when they lack the funding or technical systems to make their collections easy to discover online.
Elinor Breman, Kew’s senior research leader for seed conservation, said seed banks hold extraordinary resources and decades of knowledge, but much of that expertise remains scattered or hard to access. SeedPOD aims to unlock it for use where it is needed. The platform does not remove the work of choosing appropriate seeds or successfully growing them, but it gives people a shared place to begin that search.
As countries work toward their 2030 restoration commitments, making native seeds and practical growing knowledge easier to find could help turn stored collections into living habitats. SeedPOD’s promise is simple: connect the people restoring nature with the seeds and know-how already held around the world.