Banking the world’s seeds
Safeguarding wild plant diversity and enabling its sustainable utilisation through global partnership.
Banking the World's SeedsScience projects
We partner with over 100 countries to identify, document, research and conserve the world's plants and fungi. Take a look at the projects and programmes in our portfolio.
Featured Projects
Tropical Important Plant Areas
Identifying and mapping Tropical Important Plant Areas in seven countries by 2020.
Tropical Important Plant Areas
Plant and Fungal Trees of Life (PAFTOL)
Discovering and disseminating the evolutionary history of all plant and fungal genera.
Plant and Fungal Trees of Life
Kew – Colombia Bio Programme
Assisting Colombia in making sustainable use of its natural capital and rich biodiversity.
Kew - Colombia Bio Programme
Kew’s Plant Assessment Unit
Accelerating the identification of plants threatened with extinction.
Plant Assessment Unit
Adapting agriculture to climate change
Collecting and protecting the wild relatives of the world’s most important food crops to safeguard our future food security in a changing climate.
Adapting agriculture to climate change
Banking the UK’s seeds
Maintaining and enhancing the UK repository for seeds and associated knowledge for research, conservation and habitat restoration in the UK.
Banking the UK's seeds
Madagascar yam conservation for livelihoods
Conserving Madagascar’s edible wild yams through cultivation to enhance livelihoods and food security.
Yam conservation in Madagascar
Genomic resources for healthy ash trees
Finding genes in ash trees to overcome ash dieback and the emerald ash borer.
Genomic resources for ash trees
Plant-fungal interactions in Alpine ecosystems
Investigating fungal mycorrhizas and their plant hosts across elevational and latitudinal gradients in Alpine ecosystems.
Plant-fungal interactions in the Alps
Mobile Museum: economic botany in circulation
Exploring the mobility of biocultural collections to create a unique research resource.
Mobile museumExplore more projects
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Building a climate resilient coffee economy for Ethiopia
Providing a climate-resilient strategy for coffee production in Ethiopia.
Building a partnership of systematic excellence – a checklist of selected families of Boyacá
Creating a hard-copy publication of an annotated checklist of the Myrtaceae and Fabaceae of Boyacá, Colombia, supported by an online catalogue of specimen data.
Boyacá’s Páramo Plants for Life
This project’s ambition is to research the impact of climate change on important plants for the ecosystem services of the páramos of Boyacá, Colombia.
GeoCAT – Geospatial Conservation Assessment Tool
GeoCAT is a web tool that harnesses primary biological data for semi-automated IUCN Red List assessment and analysis.
Neotropikey
Illustrated, multi-access identification resources to Neotropical angiosperm families with additional family webpages, generic and specific identification keys.
Tropical Important Plant Areas (TIPAs) in Bolivia
Identifying Tropical Important Plant Areas in the Chiquitano ecoregion of Bolivia and bordering Brazil.
Tropical legume trees under the microscope
Systematic, taxonomic and floristic research focussed on neotropical, ecologically and economically important groups of legume tree species.
Yams of West and South West Ethiopia
Conserving yam agrobiodiversity and associated indigenous knowledge for Ethiopia’s future.
Adapting agriculture to climate change
Collecting and protecting the wild relatives of the world’s most important food crops to safeguard our future food security in a changing climate.
African Acanthaceae: diversity and conservation
Taxonomic research into this diverse plant family is helping to inform plant conservation planning in Africa.
African Cyperaceae
Researching the biodiversity, evolution and ecology of Cyperaceae, one of Africa’s most diverse monocot families.
Annotated systematic checklist of the Compositae of Bolivia
Providing an updated, fully synonymized, annotated systematic checklist of the Compositae of Bolivia, available online and in print as a precursor to a Flora account of the family.