The iconic 'Doomsday Vault' – aka Norway's Svalbard Global Seed Vault – is perhaps the world's best-known seed bank.
Holding over a million seed samples from plants from almost every country, the monolithic fortress is like a global insurance policy, ensuring the world of tomorrow has vital seed backups to grow food and other essential crops in an uncertain future.
But for all the Doomsday Vault's impressive collection, nature has it comprehensively beat.
The world's biggest seed bank is actually hidden beneath your feet, in what's called the soil seed bank – nature's own vast repository of seeds lying in wait on the ground, in the dirt, or scattered among leaf litter.
Unlike Svalbard's meticulously coordinated donations, deposits in the soil seed bank are a chaotic affair, with seeds falling randomly onto the ground, carried on the wind, or dispersed via floods.
Despite the randomness, it amounts to a staggeringly large reserve of seeds, new research shows.
In a study published in Nature Communications, scientists analyzed a global database of the soil seed bank, containing 3,096 records of soil samples collected from 94 countries across all seven continents.
Millions of seeds and seedlings were counted and identified in those samples, as part of some 1,400 studies.
Those seeds are an immense reservoir we can now put some numbers to.
The team's calculations suggest that globally, there's an average of more than 5,000 seeds hidden in the soil for every square meter of surface, across land, wetland, and aquatic environments worldwide.
At least 5k/square meter, based on how many weeds spring up on my place every spring.
Plus, if you think about it, what seeds are and the miraculous thing that they do is proof of intelligent design/God.
Anyone who has plowed a field knows this. Turn the earth over and leave it, and the immense number of seeds that were buried in that soil will sprout. It's why, if you really need to start with bare ground, you either need to turn that earth over year after year (and multiple times per year to prevent each year's "crop" from going to seed, unless you want to spray herbicides) until you exhaust the reservoir of (mostly weed) seeds.
ReplyDeleteAnon 5:16 is correct. I I don't stay on it, my little bit of desert will start sprouting Goatheads in the minutes after a rain.
ReplyDelete5000 weeds per square meter? Sounds like my lawn.
ReplyDeleteHaha! Same same.
Delete