Seed bank is a 'Noah's Ark' for desert plants

Corina Godoy has an unorthodox dream.

She hopes to adopt a bird. She’s not yet sure what kind of bird, but it needs to have a taste for feasting on the juicy red berries that grow on lycium, a thorny shrub found throughout the deserts of Southern California.

Sometime after her bird eats those berries, Godoy imagines she’ll root through its droppings. Then the scientist will pluck out the lycium seeds that had been nestled inside the red berries, waiting, as nature intended, for the bird’s acidic digestive system to free them and prime them for planting.

But instead of sowing the seeds, Godoy’s dream is to carefully store them in a refrigerator. That way, if a wildfire or climate change or other disaster decimates the local lycium population, she’ll have seeds ready to help ensure the shrub — and the wildlife that depends on it — can live to see another day.

These are what your dreams look like when you’re part of a small team tasked with trying to preserve the biodiversity of Southern California’s deserts.

210 species so far 

Mojave Desert Land Trust started a seed bank at its Joshua Tree, California, headquarters back in 2017 to help restore and enhance habitat for rare, threatened and culturally important species. Over the past six years, Godoy and her colleagues have collected, processed and secured seeds for some 210 species of plants found in the Mojave and Colorado deserts, including the beloved Joshua tree.

“This seed bank acts as an insurance policy — or, if you want to look at it a different way, like Noah’s Ark,” Godoy said. “When there is a need for that seed, our mission is to have it ready.”

Still, so far, the Mojave Desert Seed Bank is safeguarding less than 10% of the plant species found in the nearby deserts. 

“We don’t think of the desert as this really lush, biodiverse forest,” said Kelly Herbinson, joint executive director of the Mojave Desert Land Trust. “But it really is. In fact, we have a higher level of biodiversity than many pine forest ecosystems.”

Thanks to a $3.2 million California grant, and a large contribution from an anonymous private donor, the trust’s seed bank is about to get a lot of new deposits.

Herbinson said they plan to use the new funding to collect and bank seeds representing at least 300 more species over the next four years. Eventually, if funding and the climate and Godoy’s adopted bird cooperate, the team hopes to have seeds representing all of the roughly 2,400 species of  nearby desert plants.

Along with preserving “one of the last remaining intact ecosystems in the United States,” Herbinson said her team hopes the work they’re doing might also help scientists around the world chart a survival strategy for plant life in regions that are starting to turn into deserts because of climate change.

A different kind of bank

Farmers have always informally “banked” seeds, saving and exchanging them to replant and rotate their crops. But picture a seed bank and you might conjure up images of a massive concrete bunker on a hillside in the arctic’s frozen tundra.

Appropriately known as the “doomsday" vault, Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the most famous such facility in the world. The structure is capable of surviving a nuclear blast. It’s now holding more than 1.2 million seeds representing the most important food crops in the world.

The Norway facility actually stores copies of seeds. Originals stay with one of the estimated 1,700 other banks around the world. But if a cataclysmic event occurred, the Norway facility could release its copies to fend off potential famine.

If Norway’s seed bank is like Fort Knox, think of the Mojave Desert Seed Bank like your local credit union.

The Joshua Tree site is open to the public, and the facility isn’t focused on crop seeds. The concept of preserving all of the local plant life, Herbinson said, is based on growing awareness of how even plants of the same species can have different genetics in different parts of the world.

“We kind of joke that we have an artisanal operation,” Herbinson said. “All of our seed is locally sourced to this specific genetic population.”

Three refrigerators

For now, the Mojave Desert Seed Bank team does its work in a small room packed with three refrigerators, tools and a Trader Joe’s bags full of plant clippings.

Since the nonprofit's founding in 2006, the trust has bought up and conserved more than 800 plots of desert land that total some 120,000 acres. They’ve donated about half of that land to the National Park Service or Bureau of Land Management, where it’s preserved as wilderness areas. The trust plans to preserve the other half for its own use, which includes allowing Godoy and others on the team to hunt down seeds from plants still on their wish list.