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Diversity), the United Nations Development Program, the Global Environment Facility, and the World Bank. In addition, relevant UK government departments (Department for International Development formerly ODA, Department of the Environment, and Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food) and conservation bodies have been consulted, and the proposal has been presented at several scientific conferences. All such meetings have confirmed not only that a largescale seed-conservation project is necessary and would not duplicate any existing activity but also, inasmuch as Kew is a world leader in seed-banking for wild plants, that it is ideally placed to be the focus for such a major conservation effort.

The Aims of the Millennium Seed Bank

The MSB project will establish an international center of excellence for seed conservation at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Wakehurst Place. The project has six main aims:

• to collect and conserve seeds of most of the UK spermatophyte flora (seed-bearing plants) and a further 10% of the world's spermatophyte flora, principally from the drylands;

• to encourage plant conservation throughout the world by facilitating access to and transfer of seed-conservation technology;

• to carry out research to improve all aspects of seed conservation;

• to make seeds available for species reintroduction into the wild, for academic research, and for screening for potential new uses of plants;

• to develop the public's interest in the need for plant conservation; and

• to provide a world-class building as the focus for this activity.

The UK Seed Conservation Program

For Kew to function actively in seed conservation overseas, it is important that it make an input into plant conservation within the UK, where genetic erosion and endangerment are also high (Anon 1994; Wynne and others 1995). Common species will be included to supply material off-season or abroad, to add seed-biology information, to compare with in situ populations through time, and to guard against changing fortunes resulting from climate change (see Jackson and others 1990). No country holds a near-complete representation of its spermatophyte flora. Kew aims to enable the UK to be the first such country and hopes that the example will stimulate other countries to follow suit.

Our initial objective is to have conserved within the MSB, by the year 2000, seed from at least one population sample of every native UK plant species that produces bankable seed.

Stace (1991 and pers. comm.) has indicated that the native flora of the British Isles consists of some 1,571 species of vascular plants, of which 1,442 are spermatophytes native to the UK. The remainder are ferns or plants that occur only in Eire. Those figures do not include the microspecies of the apomictic