The Conservation of Wild Plant Species in Seed Banks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current extinction rates of plant and animal species are estimated to be as much as 100- to 1000-fold higher than during the recent geological past, a phenomenon that conservation biologists attribute to wide-scale destruction of natural habitats (Pimm et al. 1995). As natural habitats continue to disappear, there have been increasing efforts to stockpile wild plant species in large, centralized seed banks—a form of conservation that falls under the general category of ex situ conservation, or conservation outside the native habitat. Seed banks are facilities where seeds are stored under cold and dry conditions. This prolongs seed viability and thereby preserves plants for future use. Traditionally, seed banks have played their largest role in the conservation of domesticated plant varieties (Plucknett 1987), though some agricultural seed banks such as those maintained by US National Plant Germplasm System have kept collections of nondomesticated species, particularly the wild relatives of crop plants. During the past two decades many botanical gardens began to establish seed banks for the purpose of conservation. Most noteworthy is the Millennium Seed Bank Project at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in Great Britain (Smith et al. 1998). This massive undertaking aims to stockpile 10% of the world's plant diversity, targeting species of the dry tropics, as well as all plant species native to Great Britain. Similar, though less ambitious, efforts are under way in North America, sponsored by the Center for Plant Conservation at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, and regional initiatives (e.g., the New England Plant Conservation Program) are being carried out in many parts of the world. As well, over 700 botanical gardens maintain seed collections of mostly wild, ornamental, medicinal, and in some cases crop and crop-related species (FAO 1996).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".