Other Seed Banks
While we certainly did not invent seed banking, we believe ours is the first in the United States and perhaps in the world that is dedicated exclusively to rare and endangered species. We owe a great deal to staff at other seed banks who have assisted us from the very beginning. Especially helpful were staff at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew's Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place, and the USDA National Seed Storage Laboratory at Ft. Collins, Colorado. These institutions are now known as the Millennium Seed Bank and the USDA National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation.
Below are some links to these and a few other seed banks around the world.
USA:
The National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, formerly known as the National Seed Storage Laboratory (NSSL), in Fort Collins is among the premier seed banks in the world. It is run by the USDA Agricultural Research Service, and you can take a virtual tour of their facilities!
Other USA seed banks include:
California Botanic Garden in Claremont, California.
Center for Urban Horticulture (CUH) in Seattle, Washington.
Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona.
Holden Arboretum in Kirtland, Ohio.
Russia:
The great Russian botanist, N.I. Vavilov was perhaps the first scientist to recognize the importance to human welfare of maintaining off-site collections of the wild ancestors and other relatives of crop plants.
Established in 1894, the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry is the world's first seed bank and one of the world's largest collections of plant genetic material. During the World War II Siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg), many staff members literally starved to death protecting the collections rather than growing food plants from the seeds saved in the bank.
England:
With the dedication in 2000 of the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, RBG Kew's Wakehurst Place houses one of the newest, most sophisticated and largest seed banks on the planet. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew established the Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place, in 1974, with a focus on plants of the arid tropics. Their seed conservation program has an ambitious agenda that aims by the year 2010 to have collected genetic samples from 24,000 plants, or 10% of the planet's flora. The emphasis is on tropical and temperate areas as well as the entire seed-bearing flora of the United Kingdom.
In 2003 RBG Kew published a landmark book, Seed Conservation: Turning Science into Practice, edited by RD Smith, JB Dickie, SH Linington, HW Pritchard, and RJ Probert, which will likely serve as a central resource for many years to come. A chapter by BBG Conservation staff Ed Guerrant and Andrea Raven can be found here.
Australia:
The Threatened Flora Seed Centre works to conserve Western Australia's unique plants. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) stores seeds of trees and food crops.