On Wednesday, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault informed that it has surpassed 1.4 million seed samples after receiving more than 15,000 new samples in its second opening this year.
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The latest deposit, the 70th since the vault opened in 2008, brought the total number of seed samples secured at the facility to 1,401,285.
A total of 15,387 seed samples from 11 genebanks were deposited for long-term safeguarding in the world’s largest secure backup facility for crop diversity, which is located deep inside a mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.
The facility is managed through a partnership between the Norwegian government, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center and the Crop Trust.
The largest shipments in the June opening came from the Rural Development Administration of South Korea and the John Innes Centre in Norwich, the United Kingdom.
The South Korean genebank deposited 6,000 seed samples of 50 species, including cereals, vegetables and legumes. The John Innes Centre deposited the entire British national oat collection, about 1,000 accessions of a global barley landrace collection and several hundred wheat varieties.
The June deposit also included crop diversity from Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas, ranging from Polish rye, oats and buckwheat to Dutch peppers and beans, and Brazilian samples of cashew tree, groundnut, castor bean and sesame.
Source: teleSUR English
