The Mojave Desert Seed Bank
The Mojave Desert Seed Bank is a repository of seeds of the flora of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts. We collect, process, and maintain hundreds of collections of seeds from MDLT lands across our 26 million acre service region. Our goal is to secure the genetic diversity of the region’s flora for future generations.
Seed banks are a critical management tool for the conservation and understanding of wild plant populations. They also serve as an insurance policy against extinction. Desert ecosystems make up approximately one quarter of the state and suffer from significant drought, severe weather, and precipitous loss of habitat and wildlife. Seeds from the Mojave Desert Seed Bank are used to restore degraded habitat, for research, and for the long-term conservation of species.
An insurance policy against state seed shortages, threats
Seed banking has been identified as key to ensuring the survival of our state’s ecosystems by making seed available for the restoration and enhancement of rare, threatened and culturally important species’ habitats. Seed banking also plays an important role in long-term conservation as the state aims to protect 30% of California’s land and water by 2030.
A $3.19 million expansion of the Mojave Desert Seed Bank in support of California's 30x30 initiative is poised to help conservationists tackle the urgent need for native seed to conserve the California deserts' unique biodiversity. The California Wildlife Conservation Board grant was approved on May 25.
Growing seed bank is ‘Noah’s Ark’ for Southern California desert plants
“We don’t think of the desert as this really lush, biodiverse forest,” said Kelly Herbinson, joint executive director of the Mojave Desert Land Trust. “But it really is. In fact, we have a higher level of biodiversity than many pine forest ecosystems.”
Thanks to a $3.2 million state grant, and a large contribution from an anonymous private donor, the trust’s seed bank is about to get a lot of new deposits.
Planting the seeds for success
The Mojave Desert Land Trust is pleased to be a partner with the Bureau of Land Management's Mojave Desert Native Plant Program, which helps increase native seed supplies to restore habitat in the Mojave Desert region. Read about how this partnership has helped desert tortoise habitat restoration the Bureau of Land Management’s recent blog post.
To the rescue
“Since 2016, the organization has collected seeds and spores from more than 500 Mojave Desert species to provide an insurance policy against the plants’ extinction. Specimens are harvested, cleaned, documented and stored in refrigerators. The group has already deployed seeds from the depository in restoration projects, including in places where wildfires have destroyed wide swaths of vegetation.”
Read about the Mojave Desert Seed Bank in Smithsonian Magazine’s story on efforts to preserve Joshua tree habitat.
Seeds of hope
“As dire as some of this seems, I’m optimistic that nature is very resilient, and that if human beings do their part to protect nature, it will do the rest.”
The Joshua tree is in peril. Learn about the 50,000+ Joshua tree seeds conserved inside the Mojave Desert Seed Bank in Vogue.
Habitat restoration
The tricolored blackbird population has steeply declined in recent decades. Stinging nettles grown by the Mojave Desert Land Trust could help turn that around. One of the goals of our nursery is to restore habitats throughout the region by growing native plants. In the summer of 2017, MDLT was contracted to grow plants for a restoration project at Pleitito Creek in Wind Wolves Preserve. That’s right — a riparian habitat, not our usual desert fare!
Read about our partnership and the plants saving blackbirds in our blog.
