Svalbard Global Seed Vault
Saving Seeds at Svalbard
The Seed Vault has a capacity of 4.5 million seed samples, equivalent to about 2 billion seeds. The facility started with the deposit of safety duplicates of the international collections managed by the CGIAR Centres, as well as a number of key national genebanks. The ultimate goal of the vault is to safeguard all of the world’s unique crop genetic material as possible.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault does not operate like a regular genebank, making material available to breeders Seeds are stored under what is known as “black box” arrangements, meaning that seed packages and boxes sent for storage will not be opened or sent to anyone except the original depositor. The responsibility for testing material and for any subsequent regeneration and multiplication remains with the genebanks sending their seeds to Svalbard.
Genebanks sending material to Svalbard package the seed in specially produced foil packets. These are arranged in boxes of specified dimensions that will fit on the shelving in the Vault and securely shipped using international courier services. The Trust provides support for the ongoing operations of the Seed Vault, and funding for the preparation and shipment to the facility of unique samples from priority collections in developing countries.
NordGen maintains a public on-line database of samples stored in Svalbard.