Sefra Alexandra – The Seed Huntress – is an ethnobotanist on perennial expedition to preserve global seed biodiversity to rewild our landscapes. As a fellow of the Crop Trust, Sefra highlighted the vital role played by the global seed banking system – the Genebank Platform – in safeguarding the diversity of crop wild relatives. The fieldwork she conducted in the South Pacific focused on their version of the Irish Potato Famine with the ‘prestige’ staple food crop taro ( Colocasia esculenta ). Her ethnobotanical research – “The Tale of Taro Leaf Blight” – was published in the Journal of Food Security.

Sefra runs a disaster response and expeditionary entrepreneurial outfit – Tactivate – with her twin brother, deploying to island nations after natural disasters as featured in Forbes. Together with local agrarian leaders, they fortify community seed banks to promote bioregional seed sovereignty as the greatest tool of regenerative resilience. In the USA, she has seed hunted for the Seeds of Success program in the remote backcountry of Idaho for endangered species to be safeguarded at the Millennium Seed Bank | Kew and revived the allium heirloom Southport Globe Onion in her hometown of Connecticut.

Sefra is currently leading The Ecotype Project to amplify the amount of truly local native seed available for ecological restoration, by creating the first ecoregional seed supply chain in the Northeast, USA. In 2020 she began BOATanical.org, where she guides expeditions that are “paddlin’ for the pollinators,” planting native plants by boat along riparian corridors.

Sefra holds her M.A.T. in agroecological education from Cornell University, is a WINGS WorldQuest expedition Flag Carrier and member of the Explorers Club and runs a wilderness skills school- The Readiness Collective.