[SOS-PCA] Do subspecies and varieties count for SOS?

[Carol_Spurrier at blm.gov]

I was just asked this question by one of the BLM collectors, and here is
the answer.

Every seed collection counts!!!   Kew is only interested in having one
collection of each species.  They want one collection of  a species and
they do not necessarily care which subspecies or variety they get, as long
as they get a good collection of over 10,000 viable, filled seeds  They
just do not want two or more subspecies or varieties of the same species.
They are funded by the number of species that come into the seed bank, not
by the number of taxa that come in.     The coordination that I do for Kew
is to minimize the number of repeat species going to the Millennium Seed
Bank (MSB) and to maximize the number of new species going there.
Basically I try to make sure that only one collection of each species goes
to the MSB.    The fewer the repeats, the better for them financially.  If
we sent them 1 or 10 or 20  varieties of say Astragalus lentiginosus, they
get paid by the Millennium Commission one time and could possibly have ten
or twenty times the expense to clean and store.  They are working to change
that with the non biologists on the Millennium Commission, but it has not
changed yet.

BLM made a commitment to send 2,000 different species to the MSB over a ten
year period.  So, when you are in the field, look for species that can be
on that list of 2,000 that we in BLM will send to Kew, But, at the same
time if you find good collections of native species that don't need to go
to Kew, collect them too!

Remember that Seeds of Success is a whole lot more than collecting species
for Kew; that is just one part of the program.  If we were only collecting
for Kew, we would have called this the Millennium Seed Bank project in the
US.  SOS is about a US native plant seed collection that covers all of the
variety and all of the taxa, and cooperating with Kew is just one part of
it for BLM.    We set up a seed cleaning program with the Bend Seed
Extractory to handle species not going to Kew and we are working on a
cooperative agreement with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in
Pullman, WA to actively curate seed collections from BLM lands.  ARS will
distribute seeds, grow out some seeds, and place some seeds in long term
storage in the US and they will receive half of the seed from every
collection from BLM lands that goes to Kew initially.