Wild Plants and the Future of Crops

Fig.1. Members of CIAT’s Genetic Resources Program in the minus 20℃
gene bank (Credit: Neil Palmer/CIAT, 2010)

According to a recent study in the journal Nature Plants, around 95 percent of wild relatives of agricultural crops are insufficiently safeguarded in gene banks around the world. These crop wild relatives (CWR) are closely related to domesticated plants and have become increasingly important in efforts to protect crops against threats like drought, pests, and disease.

A Year in the Life of Scientific Collections

Fig.1. Scenes from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (Credit left to right: Neil Palmer/CIAT, 2011; Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity Trust, 2008; Dag Terje Filip Endresen/Svalbard Global Seed Vault, 2008)

Earlier this year, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) made a request to withdraw seeds from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which holds more than 850,000 samples from every country in the world. This request is the first of its kind for the “Doomsday Vault” that holds duplicate seed samples for national and international gene banks. The Syrian civil war forced ICARDA to move its headquarters from Aleppo, Syria, to Beirut, Lebanon, in 2012, and researchers managed to save 80 percent of the seed samples by sending them into storage at Svalbard.

Although such a withdrawal will allow ICARDA to regenerate these precious samples, it reveals the vulnerability of collections to war or even natural disasters. The year of 2015 marked a specific effort by individuals and organizations around the world to protect and sustain scientific collections, from those housed in natural history museums to frozen specimens in gene banks. We identified major trends that have affected both how collections are viewed in science and policy, as well as how they can be protected for generations to come. Read to learn more about what happened in the collections world this year, and what you should watch out for in 2016.

Monday Morning Coffee Break: Aug. 24

(Credit: Shutterstock) 

#emergencymanagement #preparedness #foodsecurity #seedbanks #naturaldisaster

Seeds for the End of the World

Fig.1. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault sits in the island Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, about midway between continental Norway and the North Pole (Credit: Mari Tefre, Global Crop Diversity Trust, via Flickr)

The lonely island of Spitsbergen in northern Norway is an unlikely home for agriculture’s last resort. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, nestled 130 meters into the permafrost, holds the seeds of tens of thousands of varieties of essential food crops, such as beans, wheat, and rice. While the Global Seed Vault operates mainly as a safety net for other seed banks around the world, such repositories are centers of research to protect biodiversity and address world hunger.