Thanks to Helen Sullivan, as usual, for excellent reporting and clear implications:

A Syrian Seed Bank's Fight to Survive

Scientists have raced to safeguard a newly precious resource: plants that can thrive in a changing climate.

The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, known as icarda, is housed in a cluster of small buildings on a dusty property in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, halfway between Beirut and Damascus. Its facilities, surrounded by fields of experimental grain, include a laboratory, nurseries, and a gene bank—a storage facility in which tens of thousands of seeds have been carefully saved and catalogued.

When I first visited, on an autumn afternoon in 2019, staff members in the main building were counting, weighing, and sliding seeds into small packets. Read more of this post

Organikos | October 22, 2021 at 12:01 am | Tags: International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, Svalbard Global Seed Vault | Categories: Biodiversity, Botany, Climate Change, Collaboration, Conservation, Science | URL: https://wp.me/p1DalB-xrw
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