Chinese economic growth is also at the expense of the environment. In order to preserve biodiversity for posterity, seed is cataloged and stored in Hangzhou.
The Hangzhou Plant Seed Archive is not publicly available. Only rarely do visitors come. The rooms are completed, a staff member must first find the keys for the archive and drying rooms. In the three different rooms there are different conditions, explains employee Qian Jiangbo, as he stands in front of a large dark box, from which temperature and humidity are controlled.
The values can be monitored here on a small display. „This is our double-15 room, there the short-term storage room and this value here refers to the long-term refrigeration chamber.“ In 15-room 15-degree humidity is said to be 15 percent, „said Qian ideal environment to dry plant seeds quickly but gently. For the second room the display shows 3.5 degrees Celsius, in the long-term cooling chamber it is minus 14 degrees cold. “
Threatened with extinction
Meanwhile, the keys are found. Chen Chuan opens a door that looks a bit like the oversized door of an old-fashioned refrigerator. This is the drying room, explains the botanist. The first stop for seeds kept here in Hangzhou. „It takes about a week to dry, some seeds take longer, some take a full month, we check the moisture in the seeds after drying, and once we measure a moisture level below 15 percent, the seeds are archived.“
At the moment there is not much to see in the drying room, the shelves are almost empty. That changes in the two cooling chambers. Here the shelves are already well filled. Chen takes some jar-like containers out of the shelves and places them side by side on a stainless steel tray. The glasses are each filled to one third: with differently shaped seeds in a variety of colors. From gray to black to bright red everything is there. „These are seeds of a special palm from Eastern China,“ explains the botanist. „The plant is threatened with extinction.“
