Banking seeds against a changed future

Dana Prom Smith in Arizona Daily Sun: In a time when apocalyptic thinking is in vogue with dire threats of global warming, asteroid attacks, nuclear holocausts, desertification, coastal flooding, climate change, financial collapse and terrorism, a "Doomsday Vault" near the North Pole seems appropriate. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the biggest and one of the coldest seed banks in the world. Located just below the North Pole in Spitzbergen, Norway, it can contain 4.5 million seed lots from all over in the world, stored at 0 degrees F.

A seed bank is insurance against a catastrophe, which would wipe out food production worldwide. Fundamentally cold storage, it's a high-powered, super-duper refrigerator dug into the side of a permanently frozen mountain with a refrigeration unit to assure a 0 degrees F temperature.

…Surprisingly, northern Arizona has a seed bank, too, not dug into Mount Humphries, but cozily sequestered inside NAU's Research Greenhouses. It's actually a maximum, industrial-sized, stainless steel refrigerator kept at -10º F, supervised by Brad Blake and Phil Patterson. Saving seeds of ponderosa pines and several other trees in the Southwestern mountains, they're preparing for the next catastrophic wildfire or parasitic infestation. Without tellers or loan officers, the Research Greenhouses' refrigerated seed bank offers insurance on mortgaged futures.

…Now, not all their work is tending to their apocalyptic refrigerator. Much is prophetic as in "Replace those invasive water-sucking Saltcedar trees (Tamarix ramosissima) along our streams and rivers, and you'll save water during our drought." Repent to be redeemed, going native to save water. They grow native and adaptable plants for restoration projects throughout the Southwest.

A pet project of theirs is the development of an aspen genotype garden on the NAU campus, to protect the threatened aspens from drought or herbivores. Since collecting aspens seeds is difficult in addition to the seeds having a short storage life, the grove will be, instead of a seed bank, a "tree bank." Acquiring genetic information from many locations, some of the genetic variations of the northern Arizona aspen can be "tree banked," giving researchers and land managers resources to restore aspen groves threatened by climate change….

A Ponderosa pine on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, shot by ConspiracyofHappiness at Flickr, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License