ILRI Forage Genebank duplicates one-third of its collection for safe, long-term storage in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault

For the third time, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) last month shipped a set of its forage genebank collection, comprising 302 accessions representing 74 species and 30 genera, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a long-term seed storage facility located deep inside a mountain on a remote island in the Svalbard Archipelago, halfway between Norway and the North Pole.

The accessions are part of the germplasm of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture that are held in-trust and made available to farmers, breeders and researchers in accordance with provisions set out in the 2004 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture

ILRI’s forage plant materials were added to the many other collections already stored in the Arctic vault on 25 Feb 2020.

This latest shipment by ILRI (it has made two previous shipments) raises the amount of ILRI Forage Genebank collections now safely duplicated and stored at the seed vault to 33%. . . .