Designs for one of the most important - but least visible - buildings in Australia have been unveiled.
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The National Seed Bank is currently housed in a series of ramshackle buildings at the botanic gardens in Canberra but the plan is to turn it into a state-of-the art facility.
The $7.2 million upgrade will mean more space to store samples in a temperature-controlled, protected atmosphere alongside better laboratories to analyse those sample, all with the aim of trying to guarantee that Australia's rarest species of plants don't disappear for ever.
At the core will be a 120 square metre concrete vault, with walls a half a metre thick. It's been designed to withstand disasters, including the fiercest bushfires, bombs and radiation. Entry to the vault will be through air-locks to prevent destructive parasites getting in.
The idea is to collect the seeds of threatened plants from remote areas across Australia but also to research how to grow them if the species is at risk of disappearing.
In the current facility, there are seeds of 4,000 types of plant, 139 of them from threatened species but the current buildings constrain the amount which can be kept and studied.
Seeds are currently stored in sealed foil in a row of freezers. Cardboard boxes and paper bags are also used.
For the new facility, the Canberra-based global architects Guida Moseley Brown set out to design a robust building but also one which is elegant. "It has to give a sense of confidence, an image that projects confidence in the future," John Guida said.
His colleague on the project Will Gardner said that laboratories were often anonymous buildings on industrial estates but this was in the bush landscape of the Australian National Botanic Gardens so it needed to look in keeping with the environment.
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Each of the states in Australia has a bank to conserve seed for countless centuries and then be able to use them.
There is also a Global Seed Vault, deep inside a mountain on a remote island in the Svalbard archipelago, halfway between Norway and the North Pole. It, too, is designed to stand the test of time and whatever disaster nature throws at it.
The unique role of Australia's National Seed Bank is to collect seed from the ACT and from the Commonwealth's national parks, from Christmas and Norfolk Islands to the mainland parks.
From the headquarters in Canberra, botanists travel the land looking for rare species, often in remote areas. They research archives from the time of Captain Cook to identify where species just might be found, and then they trek out, climbing mountains and descending ravines in a race against time to find samples of the species before it disappears.
There are about 21,000 types of flowering plant in Australia, according to botanist Judy West, the Director of the Australian National Botanic Gardens. Seed banks across Australia work in partnership and collectively have seeds from 65 per cent of the threatened species - which leaves 35 per cent to go.
One of the innovations will be the use of an emerging technology. Not all plants have seeds. Ferns don't, for example - they have spores which need hyper-low temperatures in order to store them indefinitely. Part of the new facility is designed to house this cryogenic technology.
The bank is not just for collecting seeds but also for learning how to bring them to life, perhaps at short notice if a fire, for example, destroyed existing plants in the wild.
"We are really passionate. It's not just about looking for the seeds. If the worst should happen, we also need to be able to geminate them on demand," biologist Lydia Guja said.
The seed bank is also hoping to raise $1.2 million for "transformational" equipment (it's already raised half in its "Seed the Future" project). There's an online auction at galabid.com/seed. "Funds raised will be used to purchase specialist equipment to bank more species, uncover germination secrets with modern science techniques, and invest in our volunteers," it said.
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