Botanical Resources | Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens

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Tasmanian Seed Conservation Centre

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Tasmanian Regional Rare and Threatened Species Restoration Database

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Tasmanian Regional Rare and Threatened Species Restoration Database

The RTBG and TEMCO have a ten-year collaborative history working with rare and threatened Tasmanian plants. This began with the company's funding of the propagation of endangered Davies' Wax Flower for a community planting in St Helens and rehabilitation of part of the TEMCO site at Bell Bay with threatened species provided by the RTBG.

The enthusiasm generated by these projects stimulated TEMCO to look for another project using threatened species which could be of use to the wider community involved in rehabilitation works. It was decided, in conjunction with the Threatened Species Unit of the Department of Primary Industry Water and Environment to compile a regional database of rare and threatened plants, which would be suitable for the revegetation of disturbed land.

The research component of this would establish the optimum species for each region and the ideal propagation method as well as the technique of revegetating. With the database being accessible on the RTBG website, this would allow potential users to select the plants and how, via the Threatened Species Unit, to obtain them.

TEMCO has continued to support the project and one-off grants from the Tasmanian Minerals Council and Mineral Resources Tasmania have made available additional funds for further development and research. One part of this has been field trials, the largest involving the Round-leafed Mint Bush. Cuttings were taken from wild plants, propagated at the RTBG and 100 of the more mature plants used in a revegetation trial of the old Argonaut tin mine site near St Helens. This trial has been running since mid-2004 and been very successful to date.

Round-leafed mint bush field trial.

A further arrow in the quiver of research has been the use of tissue culture, a method which has the potential to produce large numbers of plants from very little tissue. This work, over the past two years has been carried out in conjunction with the Department of Plant Science at the University of Tasmania, and has been moderately successful, bearing in mind that the technique is notoriously painstaking and fickle.

Work is nearing completion on the first 30 species and the database will then be available for all through the RTBG website. The end result should amplify the state-wide approach to plant conservation, by increasing both in-situ and ex-situ collections of rare and threatened species.