The future prospects of electronic seed lists

Abstract

For many botanic gardens worldwide, seed lists have provided a cost-effective means to replace plant losses in their collections for many decades, if not centuries. In seed lists, seeds are offered on the basis of what each garden can manage to collect and considers ‘of interest’ to other botanic gardens, some offering relatively few, while others offer many, or only wild collected seeds. Seed lists have always been printed on paper. With the use of printed seed lists, the amount of information per accession has always been quite limited to keep printing costs low. Over the past few years, electronic seed lists have been rapidly replacing printed seed lists. Since distribution is electronic, there is no longer a direct link between the amount of information provided and the cost per seed list sent out. This now offers new opportunities to share information that is linked to the plant material that botanic gardens exchange. Information is not limited to text, as images can also be included. This situation is beneficial if seed-raised plants are to be used for in situ conservation. Electronic seed lists have other advantages, but there are also some disadvantages. e.g., electronic information offered via websites is quite ephemeral in nature. Some suggestions are made to overcome the several drawbacks.