ABSTRACT
Recent estimates suggest that approximately 11,900 vascular plant species exist in Western Australia (WA), including > 1000 naturalized alien species [67]. The southwest portion of WA is officially recognized as one of the world’s 34 regions of mega-diversity or biological ‘hot-spots’ [59], containing approximately half of the State’s known flora. While habitat protection through the creation of nature reserves is critical to the continued survival of even common species in highly disturbed landscapes where remaining native vegetation is confined to scattered fragments, some species have slipped to near extincdon and only urgent intervention can prevent their disappearance. Seed banks can provide cost-effective ex situ conservation for many threatened species [51], while clonal propagation (i.e. cutting propagation) and maintenance of container collections still remains a viable (but increasingly costly and inefficient) method of sustaining ex situ collections of endangered plant species [38]. However many Australian plants have proved to be particularly recalcitrant especially for those species producing few seeds or other propagating material suitable for macro-propagation. While the discovery of the active germination-inducing chemical in smoke [33] has been a major breakthrough in significantly improving the range of indigenous Australian species able to be propagated by seed, not all species are smoke responsive. Seeds of many Australian plants appear to possess intractable dormancy traits [3, 58] and hence propagation, cultivation and
preservation of these species continue to be difficult. Solving these issues still requires considerable basic research, and hence viable solutions have generally been slow to emerge.
