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﻿ Number 9 ﻿ Amelia Lee __** Who is Nikolai Vavilvo? **__ A russian scientist who headed the Lenin All-union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in St.Petersburg (Leningrad) from 1920 to 1940. He established 400 research institutes that employed up to 20,000 people. He devoted his life to study ands improvement of wheat, corn, and other cereal crops that sustain the global population. He planned to collect all of the useful germplasm that had potential in the Soviet Union, to classify it, and use it in a national plant breeding effort.

1,460 genebanks world wide including 465 in Europe, 468 in the Americas, and 298 in Asia How they work || Why are they important? Habitats continue to be destroyed by unsustainable human activity, and along with the habitats go the plants. One of the threats to diversity is advanced agriculture || In Morocco, a hotspot for Hessian fly attacks, damage costs total more than $300 million a year, which the country can ill afford ||
 * **Gene Banks**
 * * the seeds are merely cleaned, dried, and placed in a sealed jar or packet ||
 * * for medium term storage (20 to 30 years), the seeds are maintained at the modest tempeture of 5C
 * for long term storage (up to 100 years) they keep at -18 to -20C
 * Wheat farmers in the United States lost an estimated $100 million



Cultivated corn, potato tubers,grains,beans, fodder, fruits and vegetables ||
 * **Vavilvo**
 * 380,000 gene types representing 2,500 plant species ||
 * It is crucial to understand that plant diversity is not spread evenly around the globe. ||
 * What Vavilvo thought to be centers of orgin for more and more crops, he notices that they overlapped. ||