Soil seed bank

The soil seed bank is the natural storage of seeds, often dormant, within the soil of most ecosystems.^[1] The study of soil seed banks started in 1859 when Charles Darwin observed the emergence of seedlings using soil samples from the bottom of a lake. The first scientific paper on the subject was published in 1882 and reported on the occurrence of seeds at different soil depths.^[2] Weed seed banks have been studied intensely in agricultural science because of their important economic impacts; other fields interested in soil seed banks include forest regeneration and restoration ecology.

Henry David Thoreau wrote that the contemporary popular belief explaining the succession of a logged forest, specifically to trees of a dissimilar species to the trees cut down, was that seeds either spontaneously generated in the soil, or sprouted after lying dormant for centuries. However, he dismissed this idea, noting that heavy nuts unsuited for distribution by wind were distributed instead by animals.^[3]