Northeast Ohio’s Holden Forests and Gardens is the proud owner of a new bank, but this bank doesn’t want your money. Holden’s bank deals in seeds for trees, shrubs, and other native plants. The goal is to send those seeds right back out into nature to help reforest the lower Great Lakes region.
David Burke, the vice president of science and conservation at Holden Forests and Gardens, said reforestation is an important tool in the fight against climate change.
“One of the primary solutions for climate change mitigation is forest restoration or changes in management of forests so that the forests can sequester more carbon from the atmosphere,” he said.
Unlike some other seed banks that store seeds for posterity, this one hopes to have a quick turnaround, processing and sending seeds back out as soon as possible. According to Burke, one of the biggest challenges reforestation plans face is a lack of seeds.
“One of the things people don’t recognize I think right now is that though we want to plant a lot of trees, there’s a bottleneck within this process,” he said. “We may want to plant a trillion trees, but we don’t have a trillion seedlings or seeds in which to do that.”
In fact, according to the Nature Conservancy, there are some 148 million acres of land in the United States that could be reforested, but America’s tree nurseries only produce enough seedlings to plant an estimated 2.5 million acres of forest land each year.
“The seed bank is an effort to sort of overcome that bottleneck and actually provide material to the community that people need for reforestation purposes,” Burke said.
Holden’s seed bank is actually an old shipping container nestled between a couple greenhouses, located behind Holden’s Ellen Corning Long and T. Dixon Long Center for Plant & Environmental Science.
Source: wyso.org
Photo Credit: gettyimages-paul-hartley
Categories: Ohio, Crops