Share a Tiny Space of Your Freezer to Increase Resilience of Ex-situ Seed Conservation

TL;DR

This paper proposes a decentralized seed storage system using domestic freezers and blockchain technology to enhance seed diversity preservation and resilience against genetic erosion.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed seed storage concept leveraging home freezers and blockchain, with a proof-of-concept demonstrating feasibility and key technical challenges.

Findings

Proof-of-concept confirms feasibility of distributed seed storage

Blockchain lottery incentivizes user participation

Identifies technical challenges for full implementation

Abstract

More than 95% of the crop genetic erosion articles analyzed in [9] reported changes in diversity, with nearly 80% providing evidence of loss. The lack of diversity presents a severe risk to the security of global food systems. Without seed diversity, it is difficult for plants to adapt to pests, diseases, and changing climate conditions. Genebanks, such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, are valuable initiatives to preserve seed diversity in a single secure and safe place. However, according to our analysis of the data available in the Seed Portal, the redundancy for some species might be limited, posing a potential threat to their future availability. Interestingly, the conditions to properly store seeds in genebanks, are the ones available in the freezers of our homes. This paper lays out a vision for Distributed Seed Storage relying on a peer-to-peer infrastructure of domestic freezers to increase the overall availability of seeds. We present a Proof-of-Concept focused on monitoring the proper seed storing conditions and incentive user participation through a Blockchain lottery. The PoC proves the feasibility of the proposed approach and outlines the main technical issues that still need to be efficiently solved to realize a fully-fledged solution.