[theme music] -We've got our bags ready and start collecting, yeah?

-Great.

Yeah, let's do it.

We are at the northern end of the Sheep Hole Mountains in the Mojave Trails National Preserve.

We've recently acquired this.

We're conserving it for long-term preservation of this intact ecosystem and also using it as a resource for our seed conservation and restoration efforts.

-These are all flowers that have now turned into seed pods.

This species has seed pods that are dehiscent, meaning they open out and let the seeds explode out of them.

-Today, we're collecting seeds to go into the Mojave Desert Seed Bank.

If we get a large enough collection, we'll store some of them for long-term conservation, just in case there's a need for reintroduction.

If we get a large enough collection, we'll have some for restoration work.

-When we collect seed, we don't collect more than 10% of the population because we want to ensure that there's enough for critters that rely on the seed and also that there's enough seed that goes back into the soil seed bank for the years that follow.

-Why collect only 10% again?

-Because we want to ensure that we're not taking away from the seed bank that's in the soil.

These plants will make seed.

They're going to fall onto the ground, and we call that the soil seed bank, so that in future years, that's what comes up.

10% is a scientifically determined amount that will not have any negative impacts on the environment in this way.

-I wish people knew how much life there is in the desert.

I think a lot of us have grown up with, maybe it's from cartoons or different TV shows that we watched as kids, but you have this idea of the Wild West and these open deserts where there's nothing but a couple of tumbleweeds rolling by, but there's tons of life out here.

There's tons of diversity, whether it's the plants that we work together directly in my position to conserve, or it's the bugs or the reptiles that are supported by these plants.

There's an incredible diversity of life out here.

You just have to look for it a little bit harder and take the time.

-I'm going to call that a glabra.

-There's probably a couple hundred species of plants that you see right within here.

We have foothills and then the bare bedrock of the mountain, so we get a really good diversity of plants that are protected here, as well as the wildlife.

We have tortoises here.

There's bighorn sheep in these mountains and all of the common desert rodents that live out here.

-I'm Corina.

I'm the collections manager here.

What I do is I oversee the seed collections themselves, which are stored here in our fridges.

Our three fridges are what we call our seed vaults.

Within this fridge, what you're looking at is close to millions of seeds.

What that means is the potential for millions of plants.

These seeds can go back into the land, and we're just helping facilitate their intermediary time, just keeping them safe and alive because they are alive.

We're just keeping them until they're needed.

-The Mojave Desert Land Trust is a nonprofit land conservancy based in Joshua Tree, California.

We do a lot of things to protect the California desert region, which is a quarter of the state of California.

We do everything we can to maintain a living, thriving, interconnected landscape across the desert.

The desert holds some of the highest biodiversity of anywhere on the planet.

There's more than 2,500 species of flowering plants here, for example, hundreds of species of mammals and birds, thousands and thousands of species of insects.

A lot of the life here, I think it's about a third of the species here, live in the desert and nowhere else, and are so adapted to that hot, dry ecosystem that we have here.

They can't live anywhere else.

-What does this machine do again?

-It separates the large chaff, not seed material, that's larger than the seed.

It separates out the small chaff material that's smaller than the seed, and then it uses this blower to separate out the heavier seed, which falls down below, from the lighter seed that blows out top.

This is fairly clean seed, and what we're seeing is a fairly high proportion of what we collected is probably seed material.

This is thousands of seeds there, and we've got many times that, so we really get that full genetic diversity that's captured in this large collection.

-Making sure no seeds are left on here.

-The end point is getting them back on the landscape in a way that fulfills their ecological value.

We're not a museum.

We're not trying to take these collections from the land and just store them indefinitely.

Really, what we're trying to do is take these collections from the land, care for them under our artificial conditions for a certain amount of time, making sure that they retain their viability, they're still strong living organisms, and then get them back on the landscape, either through seed-based restoration, which is just broad casting seeds on the landscape, or growing plants and transplanting those out into the landscape.

-The most existential threat of all, of course, is climate change.

The Mojave Desert region has already warmed by 3 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 100 years.

We're seeing real threats to our Joshua trees here.

By the end of this century, we're predicting that more than 90% of Western Joshua trees suitable habitat will be lost due to the shifting climate.

-That's the hard part, because I still don't really know how to tell those two.

Each one is really distinct.

-What's the satisfaction for you personally?

-Oh my God.

Wow.

That's a great question.

To me, I feel very satisfied to be able to do work that I feel makes a difference, that makes the world a little bit of a better place.

Of a better place than it was when I came here, and that will preserve these lands, which are lands that I love a lot and that we all love, that we share together, that I get to have a little part in preserving them for the next generation.

It's just really rewarding.

It's really fulfilling to me.

-The Mojave Desert Land Trust is really working to think about what does this place need in 500 years?

What are the pieces we can put in place right now that will have a lasting effect on this place?

Because we know we're all just here for this tiny little piece of history, right?

It's an interesting business to be protecting something in perpetuity.

You can't even comprehend that, right?

It's something we're really thinking about is how do we ensure that both this desert ecosystem, all the plants and animals, and the people who live here are all thriving for that 500-year view into the future?

-If you enjoy stories like this, you can support them by liking, subscribing, or checking out the donate link below.

Thanks, and stick around for the next one.

I think you're going to love it.