A seed provenance workshop was held in Horsham on 23rd February presented by Dr Linda Broadhurst from CSIRO and run by the Wimmera Region Seed Bank and Seeding Victoria. Approx 30 participants took part made up employees from the above two organizations, seed collectors and other contractors and a handful of the general public.
Dr Broadhurst’s theme was the ‘Issues of Revegetation’. Her test for a successful revegetation project was to return the targeted area to the same state as remnant vegetation of the locality.
The current rules of thumb for revegetation are
- Use seed collected locally (depending on the species locally may mean within 5km, 10km, 20km, or 100km)
- Before collecting seed ensure that there are 50 individual plants (maybe as low as 30) in the population being collected from and collect from a sample of these plants.
- It is desirable to repeat this same collection procedure for several years before using the seed for the revegetation project.
- Don’t collect from plants at the edge of the population and when collecting seed ensure that you do not deplete the seed as it is required as a food source and a seed bank within the remnant vegetation.
- Do not collect seed from revegetated localities as this seed almost always lacks the genetic diversity required for a successful revegetation.
Seed collected from close to where the revegetation is to occur is better as it is more suited to the local environmental conditions and is less likely to become invasive and cause damage to the local vegetation.
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