![the vault seed bank the vault seed bank](https://assets.wired.com/photos/w_800/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/seed-vault-the-need-cover.jpg)
Gene banks are often thought of as a last line of defense for biodiversity - a reassurance that even if the worst should happen, there are backups in place to ensure that the world can still access crucial crops like maize, or important stores of genetic material, like a strain of wheat that grows particularly well in dry climates. For hundreds of gene banks around the world - especially those operating at a regional or national level - this could easily not have been the case.
![the vault seed bank the vault seed bank](https://i.cbc.ca/1.3238981.1442946851!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg)
They were able to ensure that duplicates of their seeds existed somewhere other than their gene bank, and they were able to quickly and effectively identify the seeds they needed when they had to make a withdrawal. The researchers working on these seeds, both in Aleppo and around the world, were lucky. Researchers hope that their projects will help develop new, hardier strains of these crops that could eventually withstand climate change or disease. The seeds removed from Svalbard - a mix of cereals, wheat, barley, fava beans, lentils and chickpeas - were sent some 3,000 miles to Lebanon and Morocco, where scientists will continue research that had begun in Aleppo. For the first Svalbard withdrawal, that catastrophe was manmade - the seeds had been sent to Svalbard before rebels took over another seed bank in Aleppo during the Syrian Civil War. The Svalbard Seed Bank is perhaps the most famous example of a seed bank, or gene bank - a place meant to conserve biodiversity so that, in the event of a catastrophic event like drought, disease or war, key crop species can be repopulated. Then, one day in October of 2015, something unprecedented happened: researchers began taking the seeds out, rolling 138 black boxes containing 38,000 seeds out of the steel and concrete vault, through its doors and back into the world. For almost a decade, researchers at the Svalbard Seed Bank in Norway have been collecting and storing samples of seeds from around the globe, meticulously preserving them in a vault carved 400 feet into the side of a mountain in the Arctic Circle.