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Recorded at	February 06, 2009
Event	TED2009
Duration (min:sec)	06:17
Video Type	TED Stage Talk
Words per minute	199.42 fast
Readability (FK)	65.43 very easy
Speaker	Jonathan Drori
Occupation	ecologist, advisor, botanist, technician, pedagogue
Description	educator; commissioned the BBC's very first websites


1	00:12	All human life,
2	00:14	all life, depends on plants.
3	00:17	Let me try to convince you of that in a few seconds.
4	00:21	Just think for a moment.
5	00:23	It doesn't matter whether you live in a small African village,
6	00:26	or you live in a big city,
7	00:28	everything comes back to plants in the end:
8	00:30	whether it's for the food, the medicine,
9	00:32	the fuel, the construction, the clothing, all the obvious things;
10	00:35	or whether it's for the spiritual and recreational things
11	00:38	that matter to us so much;
12	00:40	or whether it's soil formation,
13	00:42	or the effect on the atmosphere,
14	00:44	or primary production.
15	00:46	Damn it, even the books here are made out of plants.
16	00:49	All these things, they come back to plants.
17	00:52	And without them we wouldn't be here.
18	00:55	Now plants are under threat.
19	00:57	They're under threat because of changing climate.
20	00:59	And they are also under threat because they are sharing a planet
21	01:01	with people like us.
22	01:03	And people like us want to do things that destroy plants,
23	01:06	and their habitats.
24	01:08	And whether that's because of food production,
25	01:10	or because of the introduction of alien plants
26	01:13	into places that they really oughtn't be,
27	01:16	or because of habitats being used for other purposes --
28	01:19	all these things are meaning that plants have to adapt,
29	01:23	or die, or move.
30	01:26	And plants sometimes find it rather difficult to move
31	01:28	because there might be cities and other things in the way.
32	01:31	So if all human life depends on plants,
33	01:34	doesn't it make sense that perhaps we should try to save them?
34	01:36	I think it does.
35	01:38	And I want to tell you about a project to save plants.
36	01:41	And the way that you save plants
37	01:43	is by storing seeds.
38	01:45	Because seeds, in all their diverse glory,
39	01:49	are plants' futures.
40	01:51	All the genetic information for future generations of plants
41	01:54	are held in seeds.
42	01:56	So here is the building;
43	01:58	it looks rather unassuming, really.
44	02:01	But it goes down below ground many stories.
45	02:03	And it's the largest seed bank in the world.
46	02:05	It exists not only in southern England,
47	02:08	but distributed around the world. I'll come to that.
48	02:11	This is a nuclear-proof facility.
49	02:13	God forbid that it should have to withstand that.
50	02:16	So if you're going to build a seed bank, you have to decide
51	02:18	what you're going to store in it. Right?
52	02:20	And we decided that what we want to store first of all,
53	02:22	are the species that are most under threat.
54	02:25	And those are the dry land species.
55	02:27	So first of all we did deals
56	02:30	with 50 different countries.
57	02:32	It means negotiating with heads of state,
58	02:35	and with secretaries of state in 50 countries
59	02:37	to sign treaties.
60	02:39	We have 120 partner institutions all over the world,
61	02:41	in all those countries colored orange.
62	02:44	People come from all over the world to learn,
63	02:46	and then they go away and plan exactly how
64	02:48	they're going to collect these seeds.
65	02:51	They have thousands of people all over the world
66	02:53	tagging places where those plants are said to exist.
67	02:56	They search for them. They find them in flower.
68	02:58	And they go back when their seeds have arrived.
69	03:02	And they collect the seeds. All over the world.
70	03:05	The seeds -- some of if is very untechnical.
71	03:09	You kind of shovel them all in to bags and dry them off.
72	03:12	You label them. You do some high-tech things here and there,
73	03:15	some low-tech things here and there.
74	03:18	And the main thing is that you have to dry them
75	03:20	very carefully, at low temperature.
76	03:23	And then you have to store them
77	03:25	at about minus 20 degrees C --
78	03:27	that's about minus four Fahrenheit, I think --
79	03:29	with a very critically low moisture content.
80	03:33	And these seeds will be able to germinate,
81	03:36	we believe, with many of the species,
82	03:39	in thousands of years,
83	03:41	and certainly in hundreds of years.
84	03:44	It's no good storing the seeds if you don't know they're still viable.
85	03:47	So every 10 years we do germination tests
86	03:50	on every sample of seeds that we have.
87	03:53	And this is a distributed network.
88	03:55	So all around the world people are doing the same thing.
89	03:58	And that enables us to develop germination protocols.
90	04:01	That means that we know the right combination of heat
91	04:04	and cold and the cycles that you have to get
92	04:06	to make the seed germinate.
93	04:09	And that is very useful information.
94	04:11	And then we grow these things,
95	04:13	and we tell people, back in the countries where these seeds have come from,
96	04:17	"Look, actually we're not just storing this
97	04:19	to get the seeds later,
98	04:21	but we can give you this information about
99	04:23	how to germinate these difficult plants."
100	04:25	And that's already happening.
101	04:27	So where have we got to?
102	04:29	I am pleased to unveil that our three billionth seed --
103	04:32	that's three thousand millionth seed --
104	04:35	is now stored.
105	04:37	Ten percent of all plant species on the planet,
106	04:40	24,000 species are safe;
107	04:43	30,000 species, if we get the funding, by next year.
108	04:46	Twenty-five percent of all the world's plants, by 2020.
109	04:50	These are not just crop plants,
110	04:52	as you might have seen stored in Svalbard in Norway --
111	04:55	fantastic work there.
112	04:57	This is at least 100 times bigger.
113	05:00	We have thousands of collections that have been sent out
114	05:03	all over the world:
115	05:05	drought-tolerant forest species sent to Pakistan and Egypt;
116	05:08	especially photosynthetic-efficient plants
117	05:12	come here to the United States;
118	05:15	salt-tolerant pasture species sent to Australia;
119	05:18	the list goes on and on.
120	05:20	These seeds are used for restoration.
121	05:22	So in habitats that have already been damaged,
122	05:25	like the tall grass prairie here in the USA,
123	05:28	or in mined land in various countries,
124	05:30	restoration is already happening because of these species --
125	05:34	and because of this collection.
126	05:36	Some of these plants, like the ones on the bottom
127	05:38	to the left of your screen,
128	05:40	they are down to the last few remaining members.
129	05:43	The one where the guy is collecting seeds there on the truck,
130	05:47	that is down to about 30 last remaining trees.
131	05:49	Fantastically useful plant,
132	05:51	both for protein and for medicine.
133	05:54	We have training going on in China, in the USA,
134	05:58	and many other countries.
135	06:01	How much does it cost?
136	06:03	2,800 dollars per species is the average.
137	06:07	I think that's cheap, at the price.
138	06:09	And that gets you all the scientific data
139	06:11	that goes with it.
140	06:13	The future research is "How can we find
141	06:16	the genetic and molecular markers
142	06:18	for the viability of seeds,
143	06:20	without having to plant them every 10 years?"
144	06:22	And we're almost there.
145	06:24	Thank you very much.
146	06:26	(Applause)

Jonathan Drori: Why we're storing billions of seeds