The Svalbard Global Seed Vault holds over 1.3 million seed samples representing more than 6,000 plant species. The collection spans the world’s most important food crops, from rice and wheat to vegetables, legumes, and wild relatives of plants we eat every day. It is not a random sampling of the plant kingdom. Nearly every seed inside was chosen because it represents a genetic variation of a crop that feeds people.
The Major Food Crops
Rice and wheat dominate the vault, with more than 150,000 seed samples each. That number isn’t 150,000 identical bags of rice. Each sample represents a genetically distinct variety: a drought-tolerant rice from West Africa, a high-altitude wheat from the Andes, an ancient grain once grown by a single farming community in Central Asia. The vault preserves that genetic range so breeders can draw on it when crops face new diseases or shifting climates.
Beyond rice and wheat, at least 15 major cereal, vegetable, and forage crops are each represented by more than 10,000 samples. These include maize, barley, sorghum, pearl millet, chickpeas, lentils, and sweet potatoes. Vegetable crops make up a significant share as well, with thousands of varieties of tomatoes, peppers, and other garden staples stored alongside the grains.
Wild Relatives and Lesser-Known Plants
Some of the vault’s most strategically important seeds aren’t crops at all. They’re wild relatives of crops, the uncultivated ancestors and cousins of the plants we farm. Wild relatives often carry genetic traits that domesticated varieties have lost over centuries of selective breeding, like resistance to specific pests or the ability to survive heat waves. A 2024 deposit from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics included 28 species of Arachis, the wild relatives of the peanut, nine of which had never been stored in the vault before.
The collection also includes seeds tied to Indigenous food systems. In October 2024, Bolivia made its first-ever deposit through a 400-year-old university, safely duplicating maize and bean varieties deeply connected to Indigenous agricultural traditions. These aren’t always the high-yield commercial varieties found in modern farming. They’re the locally adapted strains that communities have maintained for generations and that carry irreplaceable genetic information.
Who Sends Seeds and What They Include
Seeds arrive from 123 different depositors, including national genebanks, international research centers, and regional agricultural networks. The October 2024 deposit alone brought more than 30,000 new samples from 23 depositors across 21 countries, with first-time contributions from Bangladesh, Bolivia, Chad, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and Suriname.
The diversity within a single deposit can be striking. The World Vegetable Centre sent over 2,100 samples covering 108 distinct species and subspecies. The International Livestock Research Institute contributed 1,750 samples spanning 47 species, many of which are forage grasses and legumes used to feed livestock rather than people directly. Poland deposited wheat, rye, and tomatoes. Romania sent 158 samples covering 36 species of cereals, legumes, vegetables, and herbs. Palestine contributed 231 samples of 21 species, including vegetables, legumes, and herbs.
Even small deposits matter. Thailand sent 7 rice samples. Peru contributed 20 sweet potato varieties. Each one represents a genetic lineage that could disappear if a single genebank loses power, floods, or gets caught in a conflict zone.
What the Vault Does Not Store
The vault focuses almost entirely on food and agriculture. You won’t find ornamental flowers, timber trees, or most medicinal plants. Seeds that can’t survive being dried and frozen are also excluded, which rules out some tropical species whose seeds lose viability outside humid conditions. Crops like bananas, which are propagated from cuttings rather than seeds, aren’t stored here either.
The vault also doesn’t accept genetically modified seeds as a separate category. What it stores are the traditional and wild varieties that form the raw material for all future plant breeding, whether conventional or biotechnological.
How Seeds Are Stored
Every sample arrives sealed in a foil packet, then packed inside sealed boxes. The vault operates on a “black box” principle: Norway owns the facility but never opens the boxes. Each depositor retains full ownership of their seeds and is the only party that can request them back. The sealed boxes sit in chambers carved 120 meters (about 394 feet) into solid rock on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, kept at freezing temperatures. The surrounding permafrost acts as a natural backup, ensuring the vault stays cold even if the mechanical cooling system fails.
After water leaked into the entrance tunnel in previous years, the facility underwent upgrades in 2019 that included waterproofing tunnel walls, removing heat sources, and digging drainage ditches outside.
Why Genetic Variety Matters
The vault exists because crops must keep evolving. A wheat variety that thrives today could fail within a decade if a new fungal disease spreads or rainfall patterns shift. Breeders need access to thousands of genetic variations to find traits like heat tolerance, disease resistance, or the ability to grow in saltier soil. Without those variations preserved somewhere safe, they’re gone permanently once a local variety stops being planted or a genebank is destroyed.
That scenario isn’t hypothetical. In 2015, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas made the first-ever withdrawal from the vault to rebuild its seed collection after the Syrian civil war forced the organization to abandon its headquarters in Aleppo. The recovered seeds allowed researchers to reestablish their breeding programs at new locations in Morocco and Lebanon. It remains the clearest proof that the vault works exactly as intended: a last-resort backup for the world’s food supply.