Seed banking is a primary strategy for plant conservation and vast collections of seeds amassed over many decades contribute to global food security and biodiversity conservation. There are more than 1700 seed banks across the globe conserving the genetic diversity of the world’s crops, crop wild relatives, and wild plants. For wild plants, seed banks serve to prevent species extinctions and to complement on-ground conservation efforts to protect and restore ecosystems. In Australia, seed banking of wild species is a co-ordinated and collaborative venture through the Australian Seed Bank Partnership. Over the past 20 years of this Partnership, more than 18,000 collections of over 13,000 species have been secured in seed banks.
A premise of the efficiency of seed banking in providing secure, long-term, and low-maintenance storage of germplasm is the ability of most seeds to survive extreme desiccation and storage at sub-zero temperatures. Seeds are most commonly banked at
-18˚C following their drying to c. 5% moisture content, and such conditions form the basis of internationally accepted standards for seed banking. However, diverse wild species have diverse responses to standardised storage conditions. Identifying the storage behaviour and predicting the lifespan of seeds is fundamental to the effective curation of seed collections and to the realisation of their conservation functions. We still do not possess the means to predict how long individual collections of seeds will survive during storage. This inability to forecast the onset of seed viability decline challenges the curation and monitoring programs of seed banks as their collections grow ever-larger, older, and more precious as opportunities to recollect from the wild diminish. Current research foci for seed banking include identifying species performing poorly in storage, exploring relationships between longevity and seed, plant, and environmental traits, and exploring various approaches to studying the mechanisms of seed ageing.