San Diego Zoo

The San Diego Zoo will develop a cryopreservation storage repository for exceptional plants and build the capacity of botanic gardens across the United States to use such a repository. Exceptional plants are those that cannot be maintained in traditional seed bank collections, and it is estimated that 15-25% of flowering plants are exceptional. The project will create procedures to establish a repository for multiple institutional use and develop protocols to expand its utility to conserve specific taxa. The project will work in partnership with the Huntington and the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden to develop training for six paid interns and twenty-three botanical garden staff. The project team will create reference resources, such as best practices, written protocols, and training videos that will be broadly disseminated to the field through collaborative networks, symposia, and open-access science journals.