Some of these adorable baby trees are now chilling, perhaps for 100 years or more, in a drawer in Norway!
Last fall the Riparian Lands crew teamed up with the Statewide Seed Coordinator at Intervale Center to collect gray birch in the Champlain Valley and with our ECO AmeriCorps member Sarah Redman, here in Brighton, VT. Some of the seeds from both collections were later sent to the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station in Ames, Iowa to be tested and stored long-term. These samples currently have a 96%-98% viability! We are excited to announce that another sample from those two collections is now being stored at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) on Spitsbergen Island in Norway!
The Svalbard Archipelago, waaaay up there in the Arctic Circle.
The seed vault is well known for its remote location above the Arctic Circle in the Svalbard archipelago, and its mission of providing secure long-term storage of seed genetics from countries around the world in the face of natural and man-made disasters. The SGSV acts as a type of banking safety deposit box – storing but not owning the seeds at its location — the depositing genebanks from countries around the world continue to own their samples and can withdraw them as needed. These important genetic backups have already been put to their intended use, when a genebank was destroyed during the Syrian civil war, and scientists were able to withdraw their samples banked in Svalbard for regeneration in Lebanon and Morocco.
The vault itself has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples (~2 billion individual seeds) and is ideally placed nearly 400 feet into the rock and permafrost, providing natural cooling even in the event of mechanical failure or rising air temperatures due to climate change. The sub-zero temperatures and low moisture levels ensure low metabolic activity, providing the ability to keep seeds viable for anywhere from decades to thousands of years.
Needless to say, it feels pretty good to have successfully collected and processed seeds of such high quality, but even more importantly, to have contributed to the security of our global biodiversity.
Interested in the work of the Riparian Lands team? Check out the Riparian Lands Native Seed Partnership newsletter! Brooke Fleischman of the Intervale Center and Jess Colby of NorthWoods have been working hard to develop efficient collection and processing methodologies for our VT native seeds, and their process is documented in this newsletter—check it out!
