ARS is sending seeds like these from almost 11,000
of its plant collections to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway as part of
an international cooperative effort to preserve agricultural plants. Click
the image for more information about it.
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ARS Contributes Seeds to Global Storage Vault in
Norway
By Kim Kaplan
January 30, 2008 Seeds from more than 11,000 plant
varieties are being shipped by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) this week to the
Svalbard Global Seed Vault
in Norway.
The seeds are coming from the collections of the ARS National Plant
Germplasm System (NPGS), the United
States' system of genebanks for crops and their wild relatives. The ARS
National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation (NCGRP)
in Fort Collins, Colo., is coordinating the shipment. ARS is the
U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief
scientific research agency.
Preserving seeds is essential for food and agricultural security, providing
the genetic resources used to make crops more nutritious, higher yielding, more
tolerant of stress and more resistant to diseases.
This first shipment of seeds from ARS to Svalbard contains 471 crop species,
including maize, soybeans, peanuts and sunflowers. Additional shipments are
anticipated each year for the next 5-10 years, until most of the germplasm
represented in the NPGS collection is also stored at Svalbard.
Preserving genetic resources of crops from around the world is an important
part of the ARS mission. The United States strongly supports international
efforts to collect, preserve and exchange these resources, explained
David
Ellis, the NCGRP plant physiologist who is overseeing the project.
The ARS shipment will arrive to be part of the grand opening of the Svalbard
Global Seed Vault on February 26, when the first sunlight for 2008 will appear
over the arctic night in Svalbard.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a partnership of Norway and the
Global Crop Diversity Trust, is
designed to store duplicates of seeds from collections from around the globe.
If seeds are lost for any reasonnatural disasters, war or power
failurethe seed collections could be reestablished using seeds from
Svalbard.
The NCGRP now stores more than 730,000 separate backup samples of plants
comprising more than 6,000 species and 1,000 genera that are important to
agriculture and the environment. NCGRP is one of the largest genebank
facilities in the world and a pioneer in germplasm storage techniques.
Germplasm from the NPGS is freely distributed for research that supports
crop improvement and biological diversity.