“Our nation’s seed resources are in need of the same kind of wise management and conservation warranted by other natural resources, such as timber and oil.”
- Edward Toth, Director
MARSB’s mission is twofold.
1) To conserve and wisely manage the region’s wild seed resources, through scientific sampling, ethical collection, and banking and curation to national standards. MARSB’s efforts will increase the availability of genetically appropriate native seed across the Mid-Atlantic for use in conservation, land management, ecological restoration, and horticulture.
2) To encourage and actively contribute to the development of the Native Plant Material supply chain throughout the mid-Atlantic region. The supply chain in the mid-Atlantic, though it has existed for over forty years, is significantly underdeveloped and largely informal. MARSB seeks to stimulate the development of a more mature, sustainable supply chain.
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Seed Bank (MARSB) aims to increase the availability of genetically appropriate native seed across the Mid-Atlantic through targeted seed collection and active seed banking. We are building a network of diverse partners to collaboratively meet the seed needs for region-wide, landscape-scale restorations.
MARSB was established by Edward Toth as part of the Greenbelt Native Plant Center program within the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. In 2022, MARSB incorporated as a not-for-profit within the state of New York. MARSB has worked closely with Seeds of Success (SOS), a national effort that seeks to collect and bank the entire US flora. To date, SOS has made over 20,000 native seed collections across the country. As a partner in the SOS program, MARSB’s seed collections will not only help meet the seed needs of the mid-Atlantic region, but be stored long-term for conservation purposes.
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Seed Bank takes an ecosystems approach to conservation that results in seed collections across every ecoregion in the Mid-Atlantic. Because wild, genetically appropriate native seed is the raw material needed for ecological restoration projects, we believe this critical resource should be properly safeguarded and managed using sound scientific principles.