According to a March 2023 extract of the Florida Plant Rescue Database, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden holds 2 accessions of Remirea maritima totalling approximately 1420 seeds.

Beach star (Remirea maritima)

In fall of 2021, the conservation team at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden collected fresh seed of Florida endangered beach star (Remirea maritima), as part of the new, network-wide seed ageing research project that CPC launched in partnership with IMLS and NLGRP. This endeavor required a visit to one of the prettiest beaches in Florida: Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park. Current staff had never collected this species before, so careful studying of plants was in order.  We soon realized that many of the green infructescences had ripe seeds at the base, thus we set about, combing through the sand dunes, wiggling our fingers over the bases of beach star infructescences to gather seed.  When it came time for processing, this species proved to be difficult in that each seed was encased in a tight husk.  Thankfully, we figured out that a combination of our seed-blower, a wait of a few days, and then manual removal of the husks with our fingertips was the way to go. We were able to harvest 755 seeds, and sent 280 of them to NLGRP for the seed ageing study. The seeds that we are keeping in Fairchild’s seed bank may be used for future research or for restoration projects, as this tiny little sedge is a great dune-builder.  Coastal resiliency projects in South Florida need more beach star and other dune-building native plants.

Cyperas pendunculatus is a clonal species that showed large fluctuations in stem density, with stems having a high turnover rate at the local scale. In experimental plots there was little flowering and fruiting. On 15 August, 2003 the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden collected seeds at Site 6 from 3 separate clusters along the dunes. We stored seeds for 1 month in manila envelopes at room temperature (21„a C) until installation of the plots. On 12 September 2003 we selected a 50 m transect parallel to the ocean along a foredune with low amounts of vegetation at Site 6. We purposely selected an area that was unoccupied by C. pedunculatus to reduce the chances of wild seed germination. We randomly selected 24 points along the 50 m transect and installed a 10 x 25 cm PVC open bottom cylinder into the sand. Into each PVC cylinder, we sowed 10 seeds and covered them with approximately 0.5 cm of sand. We monitored seed germination weekly for the first 3 months and monthly thereafter for 67 weeks. From September 2003 through December 2004, we observed no germination in our PVC plots. On 5 September, 2004 hurricane Frances produced heavy sand accretion in the experiment. In the 15 weeks following the hurricane disturbance, there was no sign of germination, therefore we terminated the experiment. This experiment suggests that seed recruitment is relatively unimportant in local stem dynamics. Exposed sites that experienced hurricanes had high mortality probably due to inundation and burial by sand. Conserving C. pendundulus would be most successful using vegetative propagules.