Encyclopedia of Global Resources part 129 provides a wide variety of perspectives on both traditional and more recent views of Earth's resources. It serves as a bridge connecting the domains of resource exploitation, environmentalism, geology, and biology, and it explains their interrelationships in terms that students and other nonspecialists can understand. The articles in this set are extremely diverse, with articles covering soil, fisheries, forests, aluminum, the Industrial Revolution, the . Department of the Interior, the hydrologic cycle, glass, and placer mineral deposits. . | 1186 Sweden Global Resources had expressed interest in the project but a dispute over the ownership of genetic resources led to a delay. Not until 2004 did the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture ITPGRFA pave the way for resumption of the project which came to be envisioned as a backup to other gene banks. In 2005 planning for the vault resumed while construction the cost of which was borne by Norway began in 2007. The Global Crop Diversity Trust GCDT funds the Svalbard Global Seed Vault while NordGen and the Norwegian government manage its operation. Space in the vault is available free of charge to all governments and institutions and the GCDT pays packaging and shipping costs for developing countries. Seeds must have originated in the depositor s country or be freely available under provisions of the ITPGRFA but in all cases remain the property of the depositors. The vault itself lies about 130 meters above sea level and is built into a geologically stable hillside near the settlement of Longyearbyen. It consists of a portal projecting from the hillside an access tunnel meters long an operations office lying near the far end of the tunnel and three separate vaults. Each vault is about 27 meters long and is lined with shelving designed to hold plastic boxes containing airtight seed envelopes. Temperature in the vaults is maintained at-18 Celsius. Impact on Resource Use The Svalbard Global Seed Vault received its first seeds in February 2008 and is large enough to hold million samples. Each sample will contain some five hundred seeds meaning that the vault s ultimate capacity is approximately billion seeds. The vault will also hold genetic material from plants that do not reproduce by seed. It was estimated that as of 2009 there were some fourteen hundred gene banks in the world holding the seeds of a million varieties of plants. However most of these facilities were vulnerable to natural or man-made threats.
