China International AgTech Exhibition

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  • 17-19 March, 2025
  • NECC SHANGHAI, CHINA
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Scientists Have Launched a Living Seed Bank to Defend Against Extinction

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  • Today, Australia is home to some trees, like the Red and Yellow Carabeen, which are ancient remnants of a time when the Land Down Under was part of the supercontinent Gondwana.

  • Now those trees are under threat from human encroachment and climate change, and a new project hopes to save these trees, and other plants that make up the Big Scrub Rainforest, by creating a “living seed bank.”

  • This bank will help identify genetic characteristics conducive to surviving in a warming climate and hopefully introduce more biodiversities to these fragile ecosystems.

Some 38 to 40 million years ago, Australia became the last modern continent to separate from Gondwana, a massive supercontinent that once comprised two-thirds of Earth’s landmass, including the Land Down Under as well as Antarctica, South America, Africa, and India. Australia ripped away from Antarctica at quite the crawl—roughly 3.5 to 7.5 centimeters per year—but it took with it most of the biodiversity found on the continent.

The living lineage of that geologic break up still survives today in trees found in sprawling Australian rainforests along the continent’s eastern coast, from the northern Queensland down to southern South New Wales and Tasmania. One of the most biologically diverse of these areas was the Big Scrub Rainforest—past tense—because human encroachment and a changing climate have cleared or destroyed 99 percent of the original rainforest.

Once the largest lowland subtropical rainforest in eastern Australia, the surviving forest contains examples of Red Carabeen (Karrabina benthamiana) and Yellow Carabeen (Sloanea woollsii), whose existence in the fossil record dates back some 50 million years to those glorious Gondwanan days.

In order to protect these trees, Science Saving Rainforests, a new project run by the Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy, is creating a “living seed bank” in an attempt to safeguard these trees, along with other rainforest specimens, from the warming days ahead.