Featured Stories
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Find out how we aim to store seed from 25% of the world's plants with bankable seeds, by 2020
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Read how the MSBP undertake expeditions to identify and collect seeds for conservation
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Introducing the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership
The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership is the largest ex situ plant conservation project in the world. Our focus is on global plant life faced with the threat of extinction and plants of most use for the future. The seeds we save are conserved outside their native habitat.
Working with our network of partners across 80 countries, we have successfully banked 10% of the world's wild plant species. With your help, we are going to save 25% of those species with bankable seeds by 2020 (nominally 75,000 species). We target plants and regions most at risk from climate change and the ever-increasing impact of human activities.
Get involved - Adopt a Seed, Save a Species | Find out more about us | Read our blog
Latest news
A new typology of seed development in late winter-flowering temperate woodland plants
23 May 2013
Research at the Millennium Seed Bank (RBG Kew) and the University of Reading has identified a new typology of seed development.
What are hard seeds for?
14 May 2013
A new hypothesis has been proposed on why some seeds are hard.
New initiative from Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank to protect UK trees takes root
10 May 2013
With a host of new pests and diseases attacking the United Kingdom’s native treescape, Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank is tackling the threat by establishing the country’s first national collection of tree seeds – the UK National Tree Seed Project.
Collections from the Caribbean
by: David Hickmott, Millennium Seed Bank blog 28 Feb 2012
Follow a Millennium Seed Bank collector on an expedition to the Dominican Republic to save threatened and useful plants.
- 74 likes
- 3 comments
Observations on a strange vegetable - the snake gourd
by: Wolfgang Stuppy, Millennium Seed Bank blog 25 Jan 2013
He may be a Seed Morphologist but Wolfgang Stuppy of Kew's Millennium Seed Bank discovers there is more to the snake gourd than just some strange fruit and eccentric seeds.
- 42 likes
- 9 comments
Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank Partnership ‘top banana’ as it celebrates banking 10% of the world’s wild plant species.
15 Oct 2009
Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank Partnership is celebrating collecting, banking and conserving 10% of the world’s wild plant species by banking its 24,200th plant species.
UK Native Seed Hub
The UK Native seed Hub draws on the Millennium Seed Bank’s extensive collection of UK native seeds, as well as its horticultural and scientific expertise to help restore native plants to the UK countryside. It will initially focus on plants of lowland meadows or semi-natural grassland, but in the future it will support restoration efforts across the full spectrum of UK habitats.
Our projects and partners
Explore our global map and find out more about the Millennium Seed Bank partnerships around the world.
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