As the UN's International Year of Biodiversity draws to a close, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew are celebrating the diversity of the planet's plant and fungal life by highlighting some of the weird, wonderful and stunning discoveries they've made this year from the rainforests of Cameroon to the UK's North Pennines.

Scientists from Kew's Millennium Seed Bank in the United Kingdom and the University of Graz, Austria, have developed a rapid, new method to diagnose seed quality non-invasively and in real time.

The Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank has successfully collected 10 percent of the world’s plants with 1.7 billion seeds being stored to date.

The doom of the global financial crisis is now threatening an important seed bank attempting to collect every type of plant in the world, Reuter’s reported on Thursday.

The keeper’s of the world's most diverse seed bank are worried that the global financial crisis could cut its government and corporate funding and cause the seed gathering to wither at the end of next year, well short of its goal.