20 depositors, including those with seed collections from Albania, Croatia, North Macedonia and Benin, took the trip to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault this week.
The Seed Vault is a secure backup facility designed to provide long-term storage of duplicates of seeds conserved in gene banks around the world.
Since it opened in 2008, the Seed Vault has been steadily collecting seeds and now holds over 1.2 million distinct crop samples, representing more than 13,000 years of agricultural history. In total, the Vault holds over 20 million individual seeds.
The Vault is set 120m inside an Arctic mountainside on the remote Spitsbergen Island, off the coast of Norway.
The latest deposit includes 290 samples of maize, wheat and beans from the Institute of Plant Genetic Resources of Albania and over 1600 samples, including wild relatives of rice and watermelon, from the Institut d’Economie Rurale in Mali.
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