Bulgarian Crops to Be Preserved in Norway's Noah's Ark

Photo by forcedgreen.com.

In October, Bulgaria will send the first samples of seed germ plasm of typical Bulgarian crop varieties to the Global Seed Vault in Norway, also known as the Noah's Ark.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure seedbank on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago, about 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole.

Conservationist Cary Fowler, in association with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research started the vault to preserve a wide variety of plant seeds from gene banks worldwide. The seed vault is an attempt to insure against the loss of seeds in other genebanks during large-scale regional or global crises.

The first batch will contain dried seeds of wheat, barley, chickpeas, corn, sorghum, beans, lentils, vigna and pea, doctor Gergana Desheva from Bulgaria's Institute for Plant Genetic Resources in Sadovo said.

Over 150 million seeds are stored in the Institute which makes it the third largest sample collection in the world after those in Russia and Germany. Some 58 thousand samples of more than 3,000 species are kept under strict conditions.

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