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A Living Seed Bank Is Preserving the Amazon’s Incredible Plants
This story was originally co-published by Reasons to be Cheerful and the Outrider Foundation.
If the Amazon rainforest were to have a department store, this is what it might look like.
Within the sprawling, 130-hectare “living seed bank” at Camino Verde, a project in the richly biodiverse region of Madre de Dios in Peru, there are over 400 species of native trees and plants with often incredible properties little-known to science.
The Heliconia flower, nicknamed the Lobster Claw. Credit: Peter Yeung
There are “dragon’s blood” trees with thick red sap that heal wounds quickly; there’s Flemingia (wild hops), a leafy shrub that has the rare ability to fix nitrogen in the soil, making it more fertile; there are towering, thick trunks of ironwood, one of the strongest timbers in the world. Meanwhile, the bark of the tawari tree produces “killer T-cells” that fight cancer. All of these are coexisting in this great, Avatar-esque library of natural wonders.
“I grew up in the forest,” says Froilan Rodríguez, who works for Camino Verde as a specialist seed collector, while strolling along one of the pathways that cuts through the jungle. “It can provide everything we need. It’s a magical place.”
Camino Verde sits alongside the Tambopata River, whose basin is one of the most ecologically rich areas on the planet. It is home to endemic species of birds, reptiles, mammals such as jaguars and pumas, and notably, at least 1,255 plant species.
However, the unique biodiversity of this region — much of which is still little-studied by scientists — has been disappearing over the past decades.
In 2020, Peru recorded its highest levels of deforestation in history, with a total of 203,272 hectares of Amazonian forest lost — an area 2.5 times the size of New York City — due largely to logging and mining, according to Peru’s environment ministry. Since 2001, almost three million hectares have been deforested. It’s a grim picture seen across the tropics as tree cover is being lost legally and illegally.
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