First call for MSBP-BGCI Fieldwork Fund

A new fund to protect plants

Plants provide the foundation for the world's ecosystems and are vital for providing food, clean water and soil, medicine and regulating our climate, yet more than 20% of plants are threatened with extinction. The MSBP-BGCI Fieldwork Fund aims to tackle this crisis by enabling organisations to undertake fieldwork resulting in high quality seed collections.

Key objectives

Both the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership and Botanic Gardens Conservation International are working to implement the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, in particular Target 8 which aims to conserve at least 75% of threatened plant species in ex situ collections, and make at least 20% available for recovery and restoration programmes, by 2020. A key objective of the Fieldwork Fund is to make a substantial contribution to Target 8 of the GSPC by bringing into ex situ conservation those plant species which have not already been conserved, particularly threatened species. The Fund will also contribute to the MSBP target to conserve seed from 25% of the world’s flora by 2020.

Benefits of participation

The MSBP-BGCI Fieldwork Fund enables plant conservation organisations to undertake fieldwork resulting in high quality conservation seed collections. The fieldwork, and the resulting collections, complement on-going plant conservation activities. Part of each seed collection is stored at Kew's Millennium Seed Bank (MSB), based at Wakehurst, West Sussex. Kew's MSB provides free, long-term storage to international standards, assessments of quality of the collections and germination testing to ensure collections can be used in the future to grow living plants. The other part of each seed collection can be kept in the country of origin and used for any aspect of plant conservation, species re-introduction, habitat restoration, sustainable use or research.

Botanic organisations are invited to submit applications to the Fund Co-ordinator by 19 March 2012.

• Find out more about the MSBP-BGCI Fieldwork Fund and how to apply

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