The Ecological Restoration Alliance’s native Seed Germination Database – an open source project built over the last two years by several members of the restoration community – is now ready for launch. In this webinar, Paul Blanchflower – member of ERA-India’s steering committee – will introduce the database, trace its origins and development, give us a live showcase of this publicly accessible resource, and explain how we can use it and help build it further.
We hope to see you there. Do pass it along to those who might find it interesting. They can register by scanning the QR code on the poster below, or by using this form.
Date: April 16, 2025
Time: 4 pm onwards
Venue: Zoom Meeting
About the Webinar:
A tree in the wild makes thousands of seeds every season. Yet, not all become trees. Most do not even germinate – the soil conditions aren’t right, or it’s a bad rainfall year, or they just get eaten.
Unborn plants hiding within these seeds need assurances that conditions outside are right for them to emerge, or they just don’t bother and wither away. One seed in a hundred finds the right conditions at the right time, and germinates to become a plant to take on the next round of survival challenges. This is the way of nature.
But considering the millions of hectares of land in need of restoration today, the restoration movement cannot afford to have such low germination rates in its nurseries (and overharvest seeds from nature to make up for it!). It needs to reliably germinate native plants in good numbers while respecting the ethics of seed collection.
Yet, how does it achieve this, when each species requires different conditions to germinate? Conditions that are unfamiliar to many of us?
For a long time, practitioners, nursery managers and native plant enthusiasts in our community have been figuring out ways to coax young native plants out of as many seeds as possible. But their precious knowledge – painfully gained with trial and error, permutations and combinations – had been scattered, isolated, inaccessible. Till now.
In 2023, Paul Blanchflower, Director of Auroville Botanical Gardens and Steering Committee member at ERA-India, pushed for creating an open source database for germination techniques for different native species across India. This publicly available resource was to help anyone grow native plants anywhere. Since then, members of the alliance – united by the goal to aid the restoration movement – have been contributing their hard-earned methods of seed germination to this database.
Join us for its official launch as Paul highlights its collective nature and shows us how to best use it to further the goal of ecological restoration.
About the Speaker:
Paul Blanchflower is a conservationist and restoration practitioner who co-founded the Auroville Botanical Gardens. He arrived in Auroville in 1991, and for the three decades since, has been conserving and restoring the East Deccan Dry Evergreen Forests. He also runs large-scale ecological restoration projects, especially at depleted mines and quarries, and is a member of the Steering Committee of the Ecological Restoraton Alliance-India.
See you on the call.