In a small room tucked into the corner of the Mojave Desert Land Trust’s headquarters in Joshua Tree , three nondescript white refrigerators hold the future fate of the desert landscape.
The refrigerators are packed wall-to-wall with millions of seeds, sorted by species and collection date and stored in a haphazard assortment of glass Gerber baby food containers and pickle jars. Altogether, the stuffed shelves of the refrigerators hold over 6 million seeds collected so far through the land trust’s Mojave Desert Seed Bank, part of a pivotal race to save the desert ecosystem from climate change by collecting seeds from thousands of desert plant species.
The tiny fridge-filled room in Joshua Tree is one piece of a global effort to collect, categorize and keep the world’s plant seeds — before it’s too late. One of the most well-known examples of this effort is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, nicknamed the “doomsday vault,” tucked 100 meters into a mountain in a remote and icy corner of northern Norway. Svalbard holds duplicates of seed samples from around the world, with a goal of backing up seed collections elsewhere “ to secure the foundation of our future food supply .”
But there’s also growing attention on the need to save seeds not only for food supply but to restore damaged and destroyed ecosystems in the face of climate change. A 2023 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that even as climate change increases the extreme weather events that damage landscapes, the current supply of available native seeds is “insufficient to meet the needs of current and future ecological restoration projects.”…