Seed plants in the arctic. A prioritisation for seed banking

Sammanfattning

Seed banking has emerged as a successful strategy to safeguard against the extinction of plant species, as banked seeds are viable for up to hundreds of years and can be used in species reintroductions and habitat restoration. Due to the Arctic warming more rapidly than the global average, which is difficult for conservationists to combat, some plant species growing there may be important targets for seed banks to conserve. The changes brought to Arctic ecosystems by climate change have already been widely documented, but many species-level responses have not been reported. There also remains a considerable gap in the coverage of threatened species in existing ex-situ collections. The aim of this study is to inform conservationists of species that should be prioritised for seed collection in the Arctic. I combine red list assessments, data on existing seed bank collections, species’ ecological information and socioeconomic relevance. Additionally, I analyse long-term vegetation monitoring data from 38 different sites in the Nordic Arctic using Generalised Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) and reveal abundance trends for 211 seed plant species. I apply a scoring system to the compiled data to identify gaps and priorities for ex-situ conservation. The result was a dataset of 3010 Arctic seed plant species and a ranking of their relative priority. In the abundance-trend analysis, most species exhibited mixed or no trends and more species increased than declined. The trends of rare, vulnerable species were possibly clouded by a lack of data. The prioritisation list can be used to plan seed collection expeditions in the Arctic. Furthermore, the criteria and scoring used to develop the ranking can be tweaked for specific collection foci or be applied to data from other regions in order to support the mission of the world’s steadily growing number of seed banks.