At each seed collection site, >10 seeds were collected from underneath each of >20 trees dispersed over 4 to 8 ha.
The goal is to collect every type of seed from every seed collection in the world, especially those important for food production.
But to Brock what mattered most was her seed collection.
Taylor works with William Woys Weaver, who owns the Roughwood Seed Collection of about 4,000 different varieties of plants.
To that end, the farm bill should direct more money to the underfinanced seed collection and distribution programs.
The seed collection aims to store seeds of 10% of the world's 250,000 dryland species by 2010 and to "complete" the collection - preserving the planet's current botanical diversity for the ages - some time towards the end of the century.
The next phase of the seed collection involves a big scaling-up of Kew's efforts, using a £200,000 project to create an army of people in rural communities to help collect seeds and conserve forests in Madagascar.
Bored into the middle of a frozen Arctic mountain topped with snow, the vault's goal is to store and protect samples of every type of seed from every seed collection in the world.
Winter is something else in the mild climate of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden in California, dedicated to preserving native flora of the region and maintaining a seed collection of local endangered species.
Again, knowledge obtained from the farmers during the seed collection can help explain such discrepancies.
A general description and location of the seed collection sites are given in Table 1 and Fig. 1.
