Dan Duval of Seeds SA

Dan Duval of Seeds SA was the speaker at the Friends of Belair National Park meeting today.  He is the boss at Seeds SA – the Seed Conservation Centre of South Australia.  The centre has a close connection with the Seed Bank at Kew Gardens in London.
 
The South Australian Seed Conservation Centre was established by the Botanic Gardens of Adelaide in 2002. For more than a decade the Centre has been helping to conserve South Australia's threatened plant species and support on ground restoration. So far over 175 million seeds have been collected and stored, including seeds from nearly 60% of the States threatened flora.
 
Seeds are the primary building blocks that allow landowners and practitioners to restore and revegetate degraded environments. However collection and utilisation of Australian native seeds for this purpose is severely constrained by a limited understanding and poor knowledge base about technologies and fundamentals relating to the seed biology of Australian native plants. It is only within the last 20 years that scientists have discovered the use of smoked water as a germination tool and started to understand the role that fire plays in the natural recruitment process.
 
Even though there has been significant progress in understanding the seed biology of our plants, the germination requirements for nearly 80% of Australia's native plant species that deposit seeds into the soil remain a mystery. This information needs to be determined and made publicly accessible. 
It is  hoped that in time, this resource will help bridge this knowledge gap and can be used to support effective community and industry based restoration projects that are needed to facilitate the re-creation of functional and compositionally sustainable ecosystems across the South Australian landscape.
 
The database at Seeds SA contains 94 families, 480 genera and 1,852 species with 8,248 images.
 
Some of our local native plants are becoming extinct due to loss of habitat and the continual urban sprawl.