When the
seed is
ready
Decades of successful seed collections, read backwards. Every accession banked by the Hawaiʻi Seed Bank Partnership carries a date, and together they describe when Hawaiʻi’s native plants set fruit — the “when” that decides whether a field trip comes back with seed or with nothing.
The collecting
year
Every accession, placed in the month it was collected. The archipelago fruits all year — there is no closed season — but the weight shifts. Autumn carries the heaviest collecting, and February the lightest, at roughly half of October’s volume.
Read it as collecting effort as much as fruiting: these records reflect when seed was ready and when crews were in the field. Both are worth knowing before you plan.
Tap a month to see what was being collected.
Ready in August
Taxa whose collection record concentrates in this month, weighted so that a species with a genuine seasonal peak outranks one that is simply collected often. Taxa with too few records to read as a pattern are held back entirely.
Look up a species
Loading the record…
Built from seed-bank accessions contributed by the Hawaiʻi Seed Bank Partnership and drawn together in the 2023 ex situ gap assessment across 14 partner banks. These are records of successful collections, not phenological observations — they describe when seed was gathered, which tracks fruiting closely but also carries the imprint of where crews went and when they were funded to go.
Coverage is uneven by design of the underlying effort: a few taxa carry thousands of records while many carry one. Anything shown as a season here rests on enough records to mean something; the rest are labelled plainly so nobody plans a trip around a single data point.
Island comes from the standardized collection code where the code carries one, and is otherwise inferred for taxa recorded from a single island — a Schiedea kaalae collection can only have come from Oʻahu. Those two signals agree on 97% of the records where both exist, which is why the inference is trusted; records where neither applies are counted in the totals but left out of island breakdowns rather than guessed at.