Seed Banks and Crop Diversity
Nikolai Vavilov's expeditions mapped where crops arose and built the Leningrad seed collection; the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, opened in 2008, backs up more than 1.3 million samples.
Open in the interactive tree →Vavilov proposed in 1924 that cultivated plants arose in a few centres of origin and presented the idea at the 1927 genetics congress in Berlin. By 1933 his Leningrad institute held over 148,000 specimens, and during the siege of Leningrad staff guarded about 250,000 samples without eating them while several died of hunger. Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in a Saratov prison in 1943. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway opened on 26 February 2008 with room for 4.5 million samples and held 1,355,591 in June 2025; the Syrian-based ICARDA withdrew backup seeds in 2015 and 2017 after war disrupted its gene bank.
Prerequisites
- Farming (Neolithic Revolution)~9500 BCCollections trace where early farming created each crop.
- Genetics and Plant Breeding1866Breeders need the variation that collections preserve.
Unlocks
- Feeding 10 Billion PeopleopenBreeding heat- and drought-tolerant crops draws on stored crop diversity.