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The Mission of Preservation
| Article
# : |
20370 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
2,997 Words |
| Author
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Joann Temple Dennett
Joann Temple Dennett is a research associate of the office of
the associate vice president for research at the University
of Colorado. |
Not a single major food plant grown in the United States originated here. If the American diet involved only crops native to the United States, we would be eating only sunflowers, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, Jerusalem artichokes, pecans, and a few other native crops," says Steve Eberhart, director of the National Seed Storage Laboratory (NSSL), in Fort Collins, Colorado. Here the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) preserves more than a quarter of a million seeds of 1,848 plant species that have agricultural and economic value.
Located on the Colorado State University campus, NSSL safeguards the largest and most diverse collection of seeds in the world. The creation of NSSL is the result of a long process. New seeds were steadily introduced into North America during colonial times. Later, immigrants played major roles in bringing new seeds and plant forms from almost all parts of the world. But there was little effort to catalog or control the seeds entering the United States. It was only in 1898 that the U.S. government finally began to inventory plant introductions, and in 1901 the program was put on a systematic basis. The Section of Seed and Plant Introduction was established in the U.S. Bureau of Plant Industry.
Listing incoming seeds was only part of the project. There remained a great need for an effective system to preserve seeds. At that time, neither the Bureau of Plant Industry nor individual researchers and institutions had storage facilities. Unless the seeds had extraordinary attributes, they were either discarded or set aside once they were inventoried. The set-aside seeds frequently languished until they could no longer germinate.
One result of such losses was that requests for newly introduced material had to be denied, and it was frequently impossible to reacquire seeds. Sometimes political problems blocked reacquisition, but more often the plants that produced the original seeds had been wiped out by encroaching development. Such was the state of affairs until 1958, when NSSL was established as the only long-term seed storage facility in the United States.
Preservation and distribution of seeds
NSSL is integrated into the USDA's National Plant Germ-plasm System (NPGS), which is a large network of institutions, agencies, and research facilities. Operationally, NPGS has two major missions: to acquire and preserve plant genetic resources and to distribute both information and samples of the
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