A statewide native seed conservation initiative dedicated to ethically collecting, documenting, preserving, and expanding Florida’s native plant genetics for restoration, biodiversity, research, and long-term ecological resilience.
Protecting Florida’s native plant biodiversity through seed banking, regional amplification, conservation partnerships, and public education.
Learn About Our Mission →
Working with volunteers, landowners, scientists, and restoration partners to build an ethical, documented, and regionally diverse native seed supply.
Explore Seed Collection →
Volunteer in the field, provide land access, contribute native seed resources, share expertise, or become a restoration partner.
See Ways to Help →Our founding collection is the beginning of a much larger statewide conservation catalog. Florida is home to roughly 3,200 native plant species, and Florida Seed Bank works to document and conserve that botanical diversity across the full spectrum—from common ecological foundation species to rare, endemic, declining, threatened, and endangered plants.
Explore Our Seed Collection →Explore native plant conservation, seed stewardship, restoration science, regional biodiversity, and the urgent need to preserve Florida’s remaining plant genetics.
Along Central Florida’s ancient sandy ridges, rare native plants survive intense sun, drought, nutrient-poor soils, and periodic fire. Preserving locally adapted scrub seed can help protect the unique genetics of the Lake Wales Ridge and other increasingly fragmented scrub habitats.
Read the Article
Northwest Florida protects a completely different side of the state, where longleaf pines rise above wiregrass, wildflowers, wet prairies, and pitcher plant communities. Preserving locally adapted seed is essential to restoring these extraordinary fire-shaped landscapes.
Read the Article
Florida is home to only four native vanilla orchid species, and all are endangered in the state. The leafy vanilla orchid, Vanilla phaeantha, reveals a hidden tropical side of Florida and shows why protecting seeds, habitat, fungi, pollinators, and genetic diversity must work together.
Read the Article
One of Florida’s rarest native orchids now survives in the United States at a single known South Florida location. Carefully documented seed collection, freezer storage, propagation, and protected habitat could help preserve its remaining genetics before the population disappears.
Read the Article
An invasive weevil is killing Florida’s native air plants before many can flower and release seed. Preserving documented, regionally diverse bromeliad seed may be essential to protecting their genetics and restoring depleted populations.
Read the Article
Florida’s native plants support pollinators, wildlife, water systems, soil health, and entire ecological food webs. Preserving regionally adapted seed is essential if future generations are going to restore the habitats being lost today.
Read the ArticleHelp expand the volunteer network, landowner partnerships, native seed resources, restoration capacity, professional support, and conservation infrastructure behind Florida Seed Bank’s statewide work.
Explore the Founding CircleFlorida Seed Bank does not wait for a native plant to become endangered before recognizing its genetic value. Local populations can disappear long before a species receives formal protection. Development, altered hydrology, severe storms, invasive species, changing fire regimes, and other pressures can erase unique regional genetics even while a species remains common elsewhere.
By documenting and conserving seed while populations are still healthy, Florida Seed Bank preserves regional and hyperlocal genetic diversity that may otherwise be impossible to recover after habitat is lost.
This is the purpose of a statewide native plant genetic resource repository: protect Florida’s botanical inheritance before conservation becomes an emergency.
Florida Seed Bank maintains a statewide native plant genetic resource repository designed to conserve documented seed and regional plant genetics from across Florida’s roughly 3,200 native plant species.
Each conservation accession is more than a packet of seed. It is a documented genetic sample tied to species identity, collection location, habitat, source population, collection date, and regional provenance. Those records preserve the biological meaning of the collection for future research, propagation, restoration, and species recovery.
For species whose seeds tolerate conventional seed banking, material is cleaned, dried to an appropriate moisture level, sealed in moisture-resistant or hermetic archival packaging, and maintained in approximately −20 °C long-term conservation storage. Duplicate material can be maintained in geographically separated facilities so one hurricane, flood, fire, equipment failure, or other disaster does not destroy an entire accession.
Species that cannot tolerate conventional drying and freezing require different solutions, including living collections, propagation, tissue culture, cryogenic techniques where appropriate, and other species-specific preservation methods.