For the first time since it opened its doors in 2008, the Svalbard global seed vault has decided to open its vaults to tree seeds — specifically, seeds of Norway spruce and Scots pine.

The bank is managed by the Global crop diversity trust (Gcdt), a foundation dedicated to improving food security around the world, and is located on the island of Spitsbergen, in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard (Norway). It is a safe that holds hundreds of thousands of seeds from across the globe beneath permanently frozen ground (permafrost), in order to preserve agricultural biodiversity in the event of natural disasters, human-caused catastrophes or other calamities.

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The two species come from forests in Norway and Finland and were selected because trees, too, play a fundamental role — economically, environmentally and socially — even if they do not directly provide food resources: "The genetic diversity of tree species that make up forests around the world is affected by several factors. Of these, climate change and exploitation activities are the most significant," commented Brian Lainoff of the Gcdt.

The Scots pine and the Norway spruce now keep company with some 840,000 other varieties, from beans to rice, wheat to potatoes. Alongside the tree seeds, seeds of fourteen tomato species arrived in the same week — five of them native to the Galápagos Islands. The vault can hold up to 4.5 million seeds and is the ultimate insurance policy for preserving crops from every corner of the world.