British Millennium flora store banks billionth seed

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Millennium Seed Bank filed away its one billionth seed on Thursday in a race against time to save the world's plants from global warming wipe-out.

The bank, in a deep basement near the sleepy town of Ardingly some 35 miles south of London, already holds seeds of more than 18,000 wild plant species from 126 countries.

The billionth seed is from an African bamboo, Oxytenanthera abyssinica, and was collected in Mali, West Africa.

"Plant diversity is a vital part of the system upon which we depend. The need for the kind of insurance policy the Millennium Seed Bank provides has never been greater," said bank chief Paul Smith.

Dried, sorted and stored in underground vaults at minus 20 degrees centigrade, the seeds sit in glass jars in vaults, awaiting the day the scientists hope will never come -- when the species no longer exists in the wild.

The bank, opened in 2000, backs up local seed banks around the world. Another bank is being built in Svalbard, an archipelago off northern Norway, to hold world food crop seeds.

The Malian bamboo is valuable to local people but over-harvesting has led to the species becoming endangered.

The species is a priority for conservation for a number of reasons -- its natural habitat is under threat, it is a very useful plant, and it sets seed only once every seven years.

The goal of the seed bank is to have 10 percent or 30,000 of the world's flowering plant species safely in storage by 2010 -- a target it is well on the way to achieving.

But then the money runs out.

"As it stands now we are looking at the abyss on funding after 2010. Up to then we can stand on our own. After that we have nothing," Smith told Reuters.

"We are looking for 100 million pounds ($200 million) -- 10 million a year from 2010. That will be enough for us to bank one quarter of the world's species by 2020. That works out at just 2,000 pounds per species and seems good value to us."

Smith said he hoped Britain's finance minister Gordon Brown, likely to succeed Prime Minister Tony Blair later this year, would boost his green credentials by offering funds.

Most of the original money for the project came from Britain's national lottery. But Smith is now seeking new donors, asking everyone from Microsoft's Bill Gates to the British government to the European Union.

Under the seed bank's electronically secured laboratories there is space for coldstore modules to hold seeds -- ranging from the microscopic orchid to the world's biggest seed, the sensuous coco-de-mer -- from half the world's plant species.

Its vaults cover 930 square meters (10,010 sq ft) are stacked five meters (16 feet) high.