Energy for the Environment

Earlier today, I attended the Center for Plant Conservation Micro-Summit at the Jupiter Island Golf Club. This was a very eye-opening experience, and I am grateful for the experts that passed their knowledge down to me!

Here were some of their main points:

1. Florida’s native plants are in trouble– due to rising sea levels, global warming, urban development, storms, and invasives
2. The solution the CPC is focusing on to achieve their goal of preventing extinction is seed storage
3. Experts across Florida, at places like Fairfield Botanical Garden, go out into the field and collect the seeds of native plants (they often have to do this many times to get plants from different maternal lines). With these seeds, they dry them out and freeze them in seed banks (which are basically freezers)
4. However, some seeds are not able to be dried out and freezed, so they will collect them in vials/use mechanisms from tissue culture. Also if not very many seeds are able to be procured in the wild, experts will take the seeds they do have and cultivate them in nurseries, then collect seeds from a lab setting
5. FLPR, or Florida Plant Rescue, is the term used by the CPC and its partners for this goal– collecting seeds from at least one population of each native species
6. The goal at the end of this project is to prevent extinction and eventually reintroduce, conserve, and research these native plants
7. This is an expensive journey → to get seeds from one population of each native plant, the program will need $394,000 – on top of the $354,000 they have already raised
8. This does not account for FLPR’s greater goal of getting sides from three populations of each native plant → $1.7 million would still need to be raised (only 8 cents per person in Florida!)

These are some of the points that stuck out to me the most. To learn more, see https://saveplants.org/florida-plant-rescue/. Thank you for reading! 

Below are photos from the event: