Why Seed Banks Are Important
By Dr. Jacqueline A. Soule
There are three main reasons why seed banks are critical in today’s world:
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Seed banks store the seeds of crops for restarting crops in cases of crop failure.
Seed banks preserve wild crop relatives and crop varieties that are no longer grown, to help maintain agricultural diversity. These plants contain genetic traits that may have value for crop breeding. In this regard, seed banks are vital for global food security, as they provide plants that may have traits that impart tolerance to higher temperatures, drought, and increased disease and pest outbreaks predicted with global climate change.
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Seed banks are also important for the preservation of biodiversity and the conservation of rare plants.
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here are approximately 1,300 seed banks worldwide. Efforts are ongoing to store as many wild plant species and crop varieties as possible. Most seed banks store additional sets of their collections at separate sites as insurance against loss.
• In the 1970’s, a rust fungus was threatening the entire U.S. corn crop. Scientists turned to gene banks and the seeds of wild corn stored. In the stored seeds they found germplasm (genes) that was resistant to the fungus, and it was used to breed new, rust-resistant, corn varieties. • Following the devastating 2005 tsunamis in Asia, the seed bank of the International Rice Research Institute was able to supply farmers with seed of a rice variety that would grow in soils which had been covered by seawater. • The importance of backup seed storage was recently demonstrated in Aleppo, Syria with the International Center for Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) seed bank. When ICARDA’s facilities were captured by Islamic State fighters in 2014, the staff was evacuated, but it was not possible to save the seeds. Fortunately, duplicates of 87 percent of the seed collections were in backup storage in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in Norway. New ICARDA facilities are being set up in Lebanon and Morocco where seeds which had been stored at Svalbard will serve as the basis for renewed research and future seed banking. 26 | Boyce Thompson Arboretum | Summer 2018
