What the Flora!? S03E04: Global mission to protect Australia’s dinosaur tree

Australia's home to one of the world's oldest and rarest trees and the location of its natural habitat is kept top secret. Classified as critically endangered, it has been called the dinosaur plant and its chance discovery in 1994 is considered one of the greatest botanical discoveries of the century. To help save it from extinction in the wild, almost 200 plants propagated at Botanic Gardens of Sydney were sent to new homes at Botanic Gardens across the world. But why does growing it overseas help ensure it survives for generations to come? Let's go back 200 million years. Ancestors of the Wollemi Pine stood tall among the giants of the Jurassic period on the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, which Australia separated from about 99 million years ago. Fast forward to 1994, an off-duty park ranger, David Noble, was exploring Wollemi National Park, about 150 kilometres from Sydney, when he stumbled upon a small group of strange trees growing in a deep canyon. He looked down, he saw this interesting leaf he'd never seen before. He looked up, he saw a tree and thought, what is that? That is like nothing I've ever seen in anywhere in the world before. Noble took some specimens from these peculiar pines to the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney. Experts thought it could be the living descendant of an extinct conifer previously only seen in fossil records. After obtaining more specimens and examining other botanical records, it became clear this was a new living species. It was named Wollemia nobilis in honour of David Noble and Wollemi National Park where it was discovered. Dr Cathy Offord is Head of Australian Plant Bank Research and she's based at the Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan. She's played a pivotal role in researching the Wollemi Pine to ensure its survival since it was discovered. The discovery of this plant was on just about every newspaper all around the world, so it was a botanical superstar. This living fossil quickly became an international sensation and was nicknamed the Wollemi Pine. Despite the tree possessing amazing survival adaptations that have allowed it to exist for millennia, it's now threatened with extinction in the wild. Only about 100 individuals are left in the wild on the face of the planet. As Director of Horticulture and Living Collections at Botanic Gardens of Sydney, John Seaman also plays a key role in the conservation of the Wollemi Pine. These pines in their natural landscape are facing a multitude of threats, soil diseases, bushfires and in 2019-2020 bushfires Australia sustained catastrophic damage to natural landscapes from just extreme bushfires that ravaged the east coast of Australia. It's not just the fire that's a threat, we have found that there is disease that affects Wollemi Pine. Unfortunately it has got into wild populations so that could also be another threat to its survival. Since its discovery, Botanic Gardens of Sydney have taken great measures to collect material from the wild to research and grow additional plants. When Wollemi Pine was discovered we were starting to develop ways of conserving them in the wild but also conserving representatives of the populations in cultivation in the Botanic Gardens. By working on them in cultivation we can understand their biology and we can have a backup population just in case something goes wrong like a bushfire and we lose all the plants in the wild. It was a journey of discovery trying to understand how we could propagate Wollemi Pines. There are very few seeds produced and what seeds there are 40 metres up the tree. The seeds that we have had collected have been collected by helicopter which is a very hazardous pursuit and it's also something that's only been done for strictly scientific purposes. So my task was to understand how to propagate Wollemi Pine vegetatively from parts of the plant rather than from the seeds. Of course we couldn't take much material because we didn't want to endanger the plants and so it was a process that took a number of years to get to establish plants in our nursery. We've built up a horticultural understanding of Wollemi Pine firstly from how to propagate it to how to grow it, what diseases it might be susceptible to, what kind of environmental conditions it can grow in. From figuring out how to propagate it from cuttings to using advanced genomic techniques to determine the full genetic diversity of the wild population. Over 30 years of research has culminated into one of the most exciting endeavours yet. We're standing in a rather remarkable collection that is a representative sample of Wollemi Pines from the wild population where we keep at least three copies of every stem of every tree in the wild as part of our backup conservation collection. Previously we've distributed Wollemi Pines across the globe as part of our initial conservation efforts however we now know an awful lot more about a Wollemi Pines and the genetic diversity that sits within this population. There's this new sort of concept called meta collection where Botanic Gardens collaborate and share genetic diversity across the network of Botanic Gardens and we thought it would be great to not just do that within Australia but to do that on a global scale. Our strategy in making sure our Wollemi Pines are not all in one basket is to make sure the most genetically diverse individuals are distributed between key Botanic Gardens across the globe. This strategy to release our first ever meta collection is ensuring that the most skilled armed and environmentally appropriate Botanic Gardens across the globe are getting the most genetically diverse individuals to grow and protect this species for future generations. Particularly like Wollemi Pine where there's very few individuals left in the wild it's very important to conserve every bit of diversity that exists within that species. Some plants might be more drought resistant, some may be more disease resistant and you need all of those all of that kind of diversity within a population for a species to keep existing and evolving. To get this new genetically diverse collection to gardens across the globe the team in true Australian style packed it up in a six-pack and launched the Wollemi Pine Global Meta Collection Project aka Operation Six-Pack Punch. There'll be six plants sent to a number of different gardens and each garden will receive a different complement of diversity so different plants from the wild will be represented and the idea of that was so that everybody could contribute to the conservation of this species but not be overwhelmed by having to cultivate you know 100 individuals in their gardens and that we would spread the risk of loss and that we could repatriate plants back into our collections and possibly to replant them out into the wild should we need to do that. So how did the team decide where it was best to send these six packs of plants? Initially Wollemi Pines were only cultivated in botanic gardens and were often kept in protective cages. Not long after Botanic Gardens of Sydney figured out how to grow Wollemi Pines the plant was made available to the public in 2005 and its popularity exploded. Today they can be found thriving in parks and people's backyards and gardens across the globe. In 2019 the I Spy a Wollemi Pine Citizen Science Survey was launched by Dr Cathy Offord and Dr Heidi Zimmer allowing people from around the world who were growing a Wollemi Pine in their home garden to share their knowledge. The Wollies went viral from Hawaii to Moscow over 1,500 people from 31 countries provided key data about the tree's preferred environments and growing conditions. This valuable data revealed that Wollemi Pines thrive in temperate climates with temperatures that range between 3.2 and 25.4 degrees celsius and above average rainfall. The results of the I Spy a Wollemi Pine survey played a key role in informing where to send the six packs. Each international botanic garden was carefully chosen for its climatic suitability ensuring the best possible long-term conditions for the metacollection. Over many years more than 210 genetically diverse young trees were cultivated by Botanic Gardens of Sydney and in 2023 they were shipped to 29 botanic gardens across the USA, UK and Europe. But after decades of work and meticulous paperwork and quarantine preparations not all plants arrived safely. The six pack bound for the USA faced a heartbreaking setback. Offloaded during transit the plants picked up African beetles. After subsequent quarantine treatments they all unfortunately died in the weeks following their arrival in the US. This tragedy was described by the team as like a loss in the family. Thankfully the rest of the plants all safely made it to their new international homes and King Charles even got the honour of planting one himself at the Western Burt Arboretum. It's incredible to think that a 40 meter tall tree that was in Sydney's backyard and only discovered in 1994 is now spread across the globe. By bridging the ancient world with the modern one the team have brought the Wollemi Pine from the wild to the world by establishing this resilient globally distributed metacollection. Incredibly exciting to work on something like a metacollection where we're ensuring the preservation of the species through this genetic distribution of material. We are able to use our science to enable this really wide conservation effort is feels to me like the achievement of a lifetime. The global metacollection project sets a new benchmark for conservation and paves the way for protecting other endangered plants. We're faced every day with phone calls and emails that come in on countless threatened species that need help but knowing that we've got a framework to follow that's been successful means that we can deploy those conservation skill sets be it genetic studies to plant pathology or conservation horticulture to ensure that we've got the tools at our disposal to save the next species that comes across our desk. With so many undescribed plant species out there the story of the Wollemi Pine is also a reminder that there are more botanical wonders yet to be discovered and protected.