March 10th, 2008

To help us better understand and sustain the populations of critically important plants found only on the island of Ambergris Cay, members of the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London recently visited Ambergris Cay. As part of the UK Overseas Territory Division at Kew Gardens, Martin Hamilton and his horticulture team conducted a a population assessment of some of the less common en-demic plants in The Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands.


With the help of the Ambergris Cay Naturalist Team, Kew representatives collected seeds from a variety of plant species found on the island which were sent back to Kew Gardens in London and stored in The Millennium Seed Bank (MSB). The MSB is a worldwide effort dedicated to safeguarding 24,000 endangered plant species from around the globe. The project has successfully secured the future of virtually all of the UK’s native flowering plants, and has future hopes to secure seed collections from ten percent of the world’s plants by the year 2010.


The seeds that the MSB has collected remain alive for decades, and in many cases, hundreds of years. Seeds collected in the MSB are beneficial to mankind, whether it be providing food and building materials needed for rural communities to creating disease-resistant crops for agriculture. The collections held in the MSB and the knowledge derived from them, offer infinite options for their conservation and use. The Ambergris Cay development and naturalist team look forward to continuing work with The Kew Royal Botanic Gardens and the Turks & Caicos National Trust in the future.

Filed under: Naturalist |