Buried deep in permafrost in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, a seed vault stores close to 1.2 million seeds from almost every country on the planet. Located on top of the world in Platåberget, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault holds the most diverse collection of food crop seeds
A vault holding seeds from thousands of plant species around the world has accepted another batch of nearly 20,000 seed samples as part of efforts to secure the world’s food supplies as climate change concerns mount.
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As the group of tired botanists and horticulturalists drove along the dirt road in Victoria’s high country, they were almost ready to give up.
These scientists from Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens had been driving along the track near Swift’s Creek all morning, scanning native vegetation on the roadside.
Their quarry was the (rather accurately named) elusive cress, or
Irenepharsus magicus, a rare herb-like plant that grows up to a metre tall and has elongated sprays of small, white, four-petalled flowers. They wanted to find a specimen to harvest its seeds.
“We had that moment of despair, thinking it’s no longer here,” says Andre Messina, a Royal Botanic Gardens botanist. “Then one of the horticulturalists looked at the other side of the road in this weedy, messy patch full of blackberries and said, ‘Is that it down there?’ And it was.”