Hello, my name is Jill Wagner and the title of my talk today is Seed Banking for Scaling Restoration. I'm going to share my screen. Seed Banking is a wonderful conservation tool that allows restoration projects all over the world to scale. Seed availability can be a serious bottleneck for projects and the way to solve it is for land managers and nursery managers to collect seed regularly and bring it into a seed lab for near and long term restoration as well as banking for the future. Proper handling of seed ensures continued viability and has a powerful tool that increases options and opportunity for land managers. You can see here the future forest nursery in Hawaii and the seed bank, the Hawaii Island Seed Bank, in the background there and we have them together. We work both in the nursery and the seed bank quite a lot and here is an intern who worked with me for a year, Cali. I want to tell you about why I believe seed banking is very important. Seed collection in temperate regions is seasonal. If you don't get the timing right, you can miss the season and you are limited by that season. In the tropics, seed can be available throughout the year but people often collect what they need just for the year and don't bank anything. They don't store anything for the future. That is dangerous because sometimes if trees don't have a good seed year due to things like drought, then viable seed cannot be collected. And for both temperate and tropical regions, mast years happen. Caves can skip a year or several years of seeding so if no seed is banked, then a project is limited and they do things like remove the species from a project if they don't have seed for it. Climate disruption is happening more often. Wildfires, flooding, droughts and high winds, we all see this and that can also disrupt pollination and this can cause limited pollination and limited viable seed. There is an increase in pests and diseases that are moving all over the world. This happens with the movement of non-native species and also because prancentries are more stressed due to shifting weather patterns. Each availability can be more limited in the future due to all the pressures on ecosystems. I want to talk to you about one of my favorite organizations, Botanical Gardens Conservation International. They put out this paper called State of the World's Trees in September of 2021. It was a collaboration of 500 scientists all over the world who looked at the state of the world's trees and they found that one in every three trees in the world are threatened with extinction. For me this is a call to action. I believe we need to save resources for the next generation. This is a piece of art made by Hiroki Maranoi. It's called Brazil's Rainforest Burning. This art depicts for me how ecosystems of the world are becoming more and more separated and fragmented. They become brittle. Not only do we lose diversity within a species, but we also lose diversity of entire ecosystems. The IPCC report that came out in May this year highlighted fire as a serious threat to ecosystems. We can see this. But I do want to point out that fires today are different than what we have historically known. If we look at what is happening in California for example, we see that the fires are hotter and staying in place longer. Instead of low impact fires that burn for three to four days, they are now burning for months. The dry conditions of the soil and brush contributes to this. So even the big trees are killed. When the big trees die, we are not only losing the lungs of the earth, but we are losing the mother trees that represent the seed source for the future. And although there can be natural regeneration from the seed bank and the soil, if those young trees do not survive to maturity, we will not have seed for the future. Here are some solutions. Seed banks provide us with a resource for scaling, and that contributes to resilience, resiliency on of ecosystems. Seed banking allows us to respond to disasters. If we have native seeds to propagate or to broadcast, then we have a better chance of restoring ecosystems. Saving seeds allows us to grow, and now and in the future, we can continue to scale our projects with seed banking. Seed banking is a priority in the global strategy for plant conservation. And with the proper handling of seeds, we can store them for decades or longer. Here is another one of my favorite companies. This is Terraformation. Terraformation builds off-grid solar-powered seed banks. You can see in this photo, this is the Hawaii Island seed bank. This was the prototype model of Terraformation seed banks. And you can see in the drawings that it has three workstations. There are solar panels up at the top with a backup generator, and they can store up to 10 million seeds. This seed bank is a game changer for restoration projects. It enables us to continue to do the work that we do on native forest restoration. All seed banks have been very, very helpful in their role of saving the world's native seeds and food crop seeds, and this should not be underestimated. These institutions have done research that have been formed, that inform us today because they research the storage capacity of seeds. What is the longevity of families and seeds for banking? They provide seed for emergency disaster relief, and of course they support biodiversity preservation. The vision today is to create a global network of regional seed banks. You can see in this photo that was part of a paper published in Nature about the need for restoration, and here the global hotspots of the world. You can see in this equatorial region above and below the equatorial region, there is a huge need for restoration, and that means a huge need for seed banks. And so the vision is really to develop many, many thousands of regional seed banks so that we can put seeds into the hands of people. And we do that by teaching people how to collect and bank their native seeds and creating network of seed bankers all over the world. I will talk to you about some of the criticisms that I personally heard from large restoration projects or of any size that talk about why they're not interested in seed banking. And I want to talk also about my response to that. Some projects say that they need all of the seed that they collect now. They cannot save seed because they're trying to scale. And I believe that if we don't collect and save some seed now, we don't know what we will be able to collect in the future. Seed banking is expensive, and people say they cannot afford the labs and the staff and cannot afford to pay staff. And my response is that seed banking usually starts with nursery managers and their staff, and then they develop the project over time. And these restoration seed banks are not the huge institutional seed banks, but they do a great job of storing seeds properly and storing millions of seeds for projects. Some people say seed banking is expensive. But if you're doing a restoration seed bank, the equipment is all low tech. It's off the shelf items, and it works very well for working seed banks. Some groups collect large quantities of seeds. And what happens is that if they don't process that seed and save it properly, or just even if it's for a year or two, it will get rotten and it will be wasted rather than being stored. And that's very unfortunate. I believe we need to save seeds now to scale up restoration, and we need to save seeds and resources for the next generation. Seed banking is a great backup, and I think it is an opportunity that we should all embrace. Thank you.