[PCA] Doomsday vault to hold 2 million seeds - newspaper article

[Patricia_DeAngelis at fws.gov]

See the article at the bottom of this message to learn more about the
doomsday efforts to save the world's food plants.

Good news:  The US is already involved in efforts to conserve plant
germplasm of all kinds.  Even better, these programs are inter-related
through the Plant Conservation Alliance.  It will be interesting to see how
these programs work together with the new Doomsday vault.  Read on!

* * * Seeds of Success (Plant Conservation Alliance Program)* * *

"Seeds of Success is an interagency program coordinated though the Plant
Conservation Alliance (PCA) that supports and coordinates seed collection
of native plant populations in the United States to increase the number of
species and the amount of native seed that is available for use in
stabilizing, rehabilitating and restoring lands in the United States. "
<http://www.nps.gov/plants/sos/index.htm>


* * *USDA-Agricultural Reserach Service-Germplasm Repositories* * *
We have ARS units that collect/maintain germplam on crops as well as other
foci, for instance, grasses, medicinal plants.  They house the collections
for the Seeds of Success program as part of their Native Plant Germplasm
System (http://www.ars-grin.gov/npgs/).

"In 1990, the U.S. Congress authorized establishment of a National Genetic
Resources Program (NGRP). It is the NGRP's responsibility to: acquire,
characterize, preserve, document, and distribute to scientists, germplasm
of all lifeforms important for food and agricultural production.   The
Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN) web server provides
germplasm information about plants, animals, microbes and invertebrates.
This program is within the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural
Research Service."  <http://www.ars-grin.gov/>

* * *Millenium Seed Bank Project* * *
Seeds of Success and the ARS Germplasm system are involved in the Millenium
Seed Bank Project.

"The Millennium Seed Bank Project is an international collaborative plant
conservation initiative. This worldwide effort aims to safeguard 24,000
plant species from around the globe against extinction. It has already
successfully secured the future of virtually all the UK's native flowering
plants."(http://www.kew.org/msbp/)

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
See the the November PCA Meeting Summary and the upcoming January PCA
Meeting Summary, which explain the broader context for these programs in
the United States. (http://www.nps.gov/plants/summary.htm)

Patricia S. De Angelis, Ph.D.
Botanist - Division of Scientific Authority
Chair - Plant Conservation Alliance - Medicinal Plant Working Group
US Fish & Wildlife Service
4401 N. Fairfax Dr., Suite 750
Arlington, VA  22203
703-358-1708 x1753
FAX: 703-358-2276
Working for the conservation and sustainable use of our green natural
resources.
<www.nps.gov/plants/medicinal>


-----Original Message-----
From: Susan_Jewell at fws.gov
Sent: 1/12/2006 2:26 PM
To: mpwg at lists.plantconservation.org
Subject: [MPWG] Doomsday vault to hold 2 million seeds - newspaper article
FYI


Doomsday vault to avert world famine
12 January 2006
From New Scientist Print Edition
Fred Pearce

Global Crop Diversity Trust
International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources
Consultative Group On International Agricultural Research

WITHIN a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold
island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of
humanity.
The room is a "doomsday vault" designed to hold around 2 million seeds,
representing all known varieties of the world's crops. It is being built
to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change,
terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of
electricity supplies. "If the worst came to the worst, this would allow
the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet," says Cary Fowler,
director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international
organisation promoting the project.
New Scientist has learned that the Norwegian government is planning to
create the seed bank next year at the behest of crop scientists. The $3
million vault will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with
permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault will
have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind
two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors. It will not be
permanently manned, but "the mountains are patrolled by polar bears", says
Fowler.


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If the worst came to the worst, the seed vault would allow the world to
reconstruct agriculture on this planet”
The vault's seed collection, made up of duplicates of those already held
at other seed banks, will represent the products of some 10,000 years of
plant breeding by the world's farmers. Though most are no longer widely
planted, the varieties contain vital genetic traits still regularly used
in plant breeding.
To survive, the seeds need freezing temperatures. Operators plan to
replace the air inside the vault each winter, when temperatures in
Spitsbergen are around -18 °C. But even if some catastrophe meant that the

vault was abandoned, the permafrost would keep the seeds viable. And even
accelerated global warming would take many decades to penetrate the
mountain vault.
"This will be the world's most secure gene bank by some orders of
magnitude," says Fowler. "But its seeds will only be used when all other
samples have gone for some reason. It is a fail-safe depository, rather
than a conventional seed bank."
Norway first proposed the project in the 1980s but it was shelved because
of security concerns: under an international treaty the Soviet Union had
access to Spitsbergen at the time. With the end of the cold war and the
signing of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, which
gives legal protection to national crops, the door was open for the idea's
revival.
The project also comes at a time when there is growing concern about the
safety of existing seed banks around the world. Many have been criticised
for their poor security, ageing refrigeration systems and vulnerable
electricity supplies. In the late 1980s, terrorists ransacked an
international potato seed bank in the Peruvian Andes, while more recently
anti-globalisation campaigners have demonstrated against other banks.
The new Fort Knox for the world's crops will start by taking seeds from
the network of seed banks run in the Philippines, Mexico, Syria, Nigeria
and elsewhere by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research, which is part-funded by the World Bank. "We will then add
samples from elsewhere until we have a complete set of the world's crop
varieties," says Fowler.
The scheme won UN approval at a meeting of the Food and Agriculture
Organization in Rome last October. A feasibility study said the facility
"would essentially be built to last forever".
From issue 2534 of New Scientist magazine, 12 January 2006, page 12