Seeding Success

8th July, 2021

On 17 June 2021, Dr Lucy Commander led a seminar on Best Practice in Native Seed Collection as part of Perth NRM's Threatened Ecological Communities program, funded by the National Landcare Program.

Perth NRM would like to congratulate Dr Lucy Commander, Project Manager for Florabank Guidelines, for a fascinating and useful presentation on the updated guidelines for best practice in native seed collection and use.

Native seed collection is an extremely important part of landscape restoration projects, as it is the foundation of revegetation efforts.

The aim of the seminar was to inform seed collectors from community, local government, NGOs and environmental business on the soon to be publicly released guidelines and to highlight best practice methodology and highlight key issues.

Dr Commander also gave an overview of the Australian Guidelines for the Translocation of Threatened Plants (2018) and gave examples of work that she had been involved with on restoration of Threatened Ecological Communities following mining.

The presentation highlighted the technological advancements in determining seed viability, including the use of x-rays to determine presence of embryos.

Participants learned about the importance of record keeping at all stages of the seed collection, storage and propagation process.

Dr Commander emphasised the importance of well-documented planning for seed collection, particularly knowing what the intended purpose of the activity is. This is increasingly important if there is an expectation of using local provenance for revegetation projects.

The issue of provenance becomes more complicated over time unless properly documented, because there is a risk that mature trees at a site may have been introduced in previous restoration projects.

Attendees said the seminar was successful in delivering new information and a better understanding of the processes and purpose of best practice seed collection.

The participants enjoyed the opportunity to network with each other over lunch and to talk with Dr Commander and ask further questions after her presentation.

“I found the record keeping and restoration preparation really interesting and should be passed on. I’ll be sharing this info with my colleagues, we tend to contract out for collection, but it is great to further my understanding of the practices of the contractors,” said a participant via a post-event survey.

You can learn more about Dr Commander’s work with Greening Australia’s Project Phoenix here.

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This seminar was delivered by the Threatened Ecological Communities program, supported by Perth NRM through funding from the National Landcare Program.

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