Seed bank databases – what do you use?

[Heather Schneider]

We have been housing our seed bank and living collections data in Microsoft Access, but are looking to change. Our Horitculture team is interested in IrisBG, but I have no idea how well that would work for housing our seed bank accessions. What are folks using to manage their seed bank databases? I want to implement something that is user friendly and nimble enough to house all of the different types of data we record. We don’t have a budget for this at this time, but I’m open to fee-based options if they are much more powerful than free databases. Right now I just want to get an idea of what our top choices might be and go from there. Thanks!

[Meg Engelhardt]

Here at Missouri Botanical Garden we use an inhouse developed Living Collections Management System (LCMS), which is not available for purchase at this time. It works for all aspects of living collections databasing including seed bank, propagation, and aquisitions. http://www.livingcollections.org

[Katie Heineman]

Hi Heather, I know we’ve already discussed this, but I thought I would post this here for the sake of community :). I have had a hard time finding an all purpose seed bank database solution as well. Currently the seed bank at San Diego Zoo Seed Bank uses custom web database product called Caspio for our day-to-day monitoring, seed inventory, genetic repository, and germination testing activities and then we represent our accessions in our institution-wide horticulture database in IrisBG. It’s nice because we have the flexibility to custom projects and it’s web-based (so I am not limited by operation systems or users), but I don’t know if I would 100% recommend starting a Caspio database system from scratch because it takes some pretty active maintenance, and there is a lot of taxnomic functionality we just don’t have because it takes time to develop. I’m impressed by how flexible IrisBG has been in incorporating different data types (germination tests, DNA). However, there is somewhat of a steep learning curve, and almost our entire plant conservation department uses Macs, so a windows-based application is not exactly the best solution for us. It would be wonderful if there were a web-based solution for accession management community-wide (not just a repository) that were available to join and under active development.

[Jessamine Finch]

Hello all! Five years later I am circling back to Heather’s question. My primary questions are these:

Does your seed bank use a commercial solution that meets your needs?

or

Does your seed bank use a custom solution that it might be willing to share?

I am primarily interested in accession management, but also in ability to support curatorial activities like germination trials.

Thanks in advance!

And thanks to those who have already responded to this query. It seems like many banks use custom solutions, some of which may be distributable in the future. Just want to see if there is any juicy intel I’m missing!

[Heather Schneider]

Hi Jessamine,

Santa Barbara Botanic Garden eventually moved to IrisBG. Our living collections team made the switch and so we decided to hop on board. It mostly works well for the seed bank accessions and there are some customizable fields you can create to house seed viability info, etc., but it’s definitely not a perfect fit. I will also note that, although IrisBG migrates your data at the initial switch, that was also imperfect and we’ve found lots of errors that we have to go back and correct in terms of data from our OG database not ending up in the correct fields in IrisBG. So, although I think it’s turning into something good, it has been a bit of a headache switching over because we don’t have a dedicated seed bank staff and so we’re all trying to update the database and catch/fix errors in addition to everything else. I think it would have been easier if I had been able to fund someone dedicated to the seed bank (or mostly) in the first year after migration. It’s a bit of a learning curve.

Our seed viability info in IrisBG is just cut test results at the time of cleaning. We keep our germ testing info in an Excel doc loosely based on Missouri Botanical Garden’s format. Perhaps Meg will chime in here – she has a nice template that she shared with us.

I think the unfortunate reality is that there is no perfect solution, but I hope you can find something that works well for you!

Cheers,

Heather

[Cheryl Birker]

CalBG uses BG-Base, which has its pros and cons. One pro is that the data table for germination test records is fairly thorough, so that’s where we keep all our germination data. The germination data table is directly linked to other data tables, like the germplasm data, accession data, name data, etc. We had the goal a few years back to switch from BG-Base, but after a rough assessment of the options decided none of the current options were worth the costs and headache of switching because they all seem to have issues.

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