Welcome to the UNR Native Seed Bank

Safeguarding Nevada’s Wild Landscapes

We are a leading native seed processing and storage center in Nevada. Our specialized staff provide world-class seed cleaning, testing, and storage services.

What is Seed Cleaning?

Seed cleaning is crucial for obtaining locally adapted native seeds for restoration. It involves two main steps: extraction, which frees seeds from plant material and removes appendages, and finishing, which separates seeds from chaff. Each step requires specific equipment. Cleaning seeds ensures accurate viability tests, facilitates use in seeding equipment, saves storage space, and can extend seed longevity. After cleaning, seeds undergo purity and viability tests to assess the proportion of actual seed and its quality. These tests help determine Pure Live Seed (PLS), which is essential for calculating seeding rates in restoration projects.

Contact Us to learn more

Our Services

Cleaning

Our native seed cleaning services are available to anyone, including researchers, private organizations, NGOs, or governmental organizations. We specialize in cleaning wild-collected seeds and smaller agricultural-increases. Contact us for a quote!
Testing

We offer purity and viability testing services, including X-ray fill and germination tests. For collections that require AOSCA certified testing or TZ tests, we work with our partners at the Nevada Department of Agriculture Seed Lab.
Storage & Seed Banking

We offer short and long-term storage in climate controlled conditions, with temperature alerts and back up generators to add layers of safety for our precious seeds.

Our history and facility

The UNR Native Seed Bank was created in 2017 to process and store native seed. We built our facility with expert advice from the US Forest Service’s Bend Seed Extractory, National Seed Lab, and Lucky Peak Nursery, and completed trainings at the Bend Seed Extractory and the Foundations in Seed Banking course with the Terraformation Academy.

Our extraction, finishing, testing, and storage equipment allows us to process a wide variety of species.

We have 1,272 cubic feet of cold storage at 40°F and 72 cubic feet at 0° for long-term storage. All of our cold storage space is monitored 24/7 and on back-up power.

To date, we have handled over 500 collections from over 75 different species!

Meet the Director

Shannon Swim, M.S.

I am a native plant ecologist and I manage the University of Nevada, Reno’s Native Seed Bank, housed in the Leger Lab. Native seed cleaning and storage are often overlooked in the process of restoration, but in fact, these are essential first steps of any project. We built this facility in an effort to increase the availability of locally adapted native seed in Nevada to aid in restoration. Because learning-while-doing is the best, we also perform experiments to improve our handling process, ensuring that we maintain genetic diversity and maximize seed longevity.