At the same time, seeds were prepared and packed for a second back-up deposit in Svalbard.Ī delegation from ICARDA, led by Chair Margret Thalwitz and Director General Aly Abousabaa accompanied NordGen staff when 15,160 plant varieties and other genotypes were re-deposited in the Seed Vault on Wednesday the 22 nd of February. During the summer of 2016, fresh seeds of a number of cereal and legume species were harvested for the re-establishment of gene bank functions in Morocco and Lebanon.
A total of 38,073 seed samples were returned from Svalbard and immediately sown. In 2015, ICARDA became the first gene bank to request the withdrawal of seeds from the security seed depository in Svalbard as the war in Syria made the Aleppo gene bank inaccessible. On February 22 nd, new fresh seeds multiplied at ICARDA units in Morocco and Lebanon were re-deposited, as were seeds from nine other gene banks But one set will return to the vault in Svalbard - just in case there's another emergency.Seed accessions from ICARDA that were taken out in September 2015 are back in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Most will stay at ICARDA's new seed collection, available for sharing with plant breeders around the world.
ICARDA scientists in Morocco and Lebanon will grow new plants from those seeds harvesting duplicate copies. The keepers of the vault will haul out 130 boxes containing tens of thousands of small aluminum packets, each one filled with seeds. ICARDA could have reconstituted its collection from seeds that it had shared with other seed banks, but the backup copy at Svalbard had been generated more recently, and it was conveniently all in one place. It's carved into the side of a frozen mountain in the Norwegian-controlled archipelago called Svalbard. To do so, it's asking to retrieve part of its seed backup from that Arctic vault - officially called the Global Seed Vault. So ICARDA has decided to rebuild its seed collection in Morocco. "On occasion, staff from Aleppo do go there to retrieve seeds to fulfill requests, but that's just becoming too difficult now," he says. Guarino says the seed collection is still in Aleppo, but it's really hard to use it. Most of ICARDA's scientists have left the country. This was just in time, because ICARDA is based in Aleppo, Syria, which has been caught up in that country's ongoing violence. A few years ago, it sent a backup copy of the whole collection to the doomsday vault. These seeds could be the building blocks for new varieties that farmers may need in the future.įor decades, ICARDA stored its seeds in a refrigerated room at its headquarters and shared them with other researchers in other countries. Hidden in collections like these, they may find plants that can survive new diseases, or thrive in a changing climate. "It's material that in many cases is no longer grown in the field," he says. Scientists would have a very hard time finding many of these varieties today. Luigi Guarino, a scientist with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which was set up to help secure seed collections around the world, says many of ICARDA's seeds were collected decades ago. Among the most important are wheat, barley, chickpeas and lentils.
#WHEN DID SYRIA GET DOOMSDAY VAULT PLUS#
ICARDA works in areas across North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia and has an important collection of seeds in the vault - more than 135,000 different samples of crops that farmers have planted in these regions for thousands of years plus wild relatives of those crops. The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas wants to make the withdrawal. Now, for the first time, they're about to bring some seeds back out. It's sometimes called the "doomsday vault."įor the past seven years, scientists have been putting seeds into this vault, filling it with samples of the crops that people rely on for food. Halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, there's an underground vault filled with seeds.
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