Seed banking of endangered plants: are we conserving the right species to address climate change?

The increasing awareness of the effects of climate change on plant distributions in situ has made the appropriate application of ex situ techniques more crucial. These ex situ conservation techniques need to be targeted to priority species identified at risk from climate change. The present paper assesses the sensitivity of plant species to climate change in Belgium and explores the current conservation status of those species potentially vulnerable to climate change. We then checked whether these species were included in ex situ collections. The whole Belgian flora has been assessed (a total of 1,396 native plant species). We evaluated whether each of these species occurs in a “climate change-vulnerable” habitat, having therefore a higher probability to be impacted by climate change. The assessment revealed that there are at least 415 native plant species (30% of the Belgian native flora) that appear to be vulnerable to climate change during the next decades. Results also showed that about one-third of the species currently included in the red list may have their situation made potentially worse due to climate change. In addition, depending on the region, between 45 and 67% of the species that are currently not threatened in Belgium are likely to become so due to climate change. It also appeared that only 32% of these climate change-vulnerable species are currently held ex situ. We conclude that there is a need to identify gaps in existing ex situ collections as an urgent priority and ensure that species potentially vulnerable to climate change are conserved ex situ.