Gary, Glenn, Jay, Dawn...

I guess, some of you folks are trying hard to preserve heirloom seeds and plants propagules with your own efforts. While I was looking for NSF grants. I come across the NSF initiative, I though it may useful resources which help some of you to save and preserve native seeds for Oklahoma Gardening for long term...

Project Baseline is a nationwide, long-term, NSF-funded initiative designed to build a research-quality seed bank that will enable contemporary and future gardeners and scientists to directly study evolutionary changes as plants respond to environmental change such as droughts and heat. We will do this by collecting and storing seeds from well-defined populations of relatively common, widely-distributed, and short-lived plant taxa. The

seeds will be archived at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, in Fort Collins, CO.

Seeds will be released to researchers at defined (e.g., 5-10 year) intervals over a period of 50 years, to be grown in common gardens with their descendants, or subjected to other, more novel, types of phenotypic and genetic analysis.

Because this project is designed to benefit the scientific community as a whole, we are soliciting suggestions for candidate species. If you would like to suggest a species or population, please fill out and submit the Species Suggestion Form at http://www.baselineseedbank.org/suggestionForm.html.

The main criteria for sites are that they be ensured of long-term protection from major disturbance and that they be physically and legally accessible by collection teams.

More information about this project may be obtained from our website : http://www.baselineseedbank.org, or by contacting Karen Updegraff, Project Manager kupdegra@d.umn.edu).

I hope this info useful to folks who are working towards conserving native gene-pool for better garden tomorrows world.

PS: Please correct me if you feel such info is out of context of the forum. In that case in future I will direct them to specific people.

Thanks -Chandra