Seed deposit guidelines

Please read this part carefully!

An electronic inventory of the samples to be deposited at the Seed Vault must be submitted at least six weeks in advance of the planned date of shipping. This inventory shall comprise the following data:

• Institute code: WIEWS Institute Code for the institute holding the genebank accession. (You may access the WIEWS institute database at http://apps3.fao.org/wiews/).
• Deposit box number: Give each box in your shipment a unique number, and record here those numbers. Do not use decimal numbers or letters, only integer numbers: (1, 2, 3, 4, ...). Use successive numbers for successive shipments (e.g. if your first shipment consisted of 35 boxes the boxes in the following shipment shall list boxes from 36 and upwards). If you have sent boxes with test samples in addition to your deposit boxes these shall also be counted.
• Collection name: If your genebank uses parallel numbering systems for different collections, give here the name of the collection, e.g. Bean Collection
• Accession number: As registered in your genebank. Please make sure that the combination of Institute Code, Collection name and Accession number together will uniquely identify the accession at the global level.
• Full scientific name: Genus species subspecies, including Authority and year of description if available.
• Country of collection or source: Where the accession is originally from. Please use ISO-3166-1 (alpha 3) country codes if possible.
• Number of seeds: This number can be based on a full count or on an estimate from the weight of the sample.
• Regeneration month and year: The harvest year is mandatory to be able to identify the regeneration cycle of the seed sample.
• Other accession designations: You may report other accession designations here (I.e. accession number for the same accession in another genebank). A semi-colon should separate each designation.

The depositor shall submit the inventory using the data submission template. The inventory can be provided as an MS Excel spreadsheet (.xls), tab-separated values (.txt, .tsv, .tab), comma-separated values (.csv) or as XML Data. Please contact us if you would like to provide the data in another file or data format.

The template can be sent by email to the staff at Seed Vault sgsv@nordgen.org. The list of accessions should be reported before shipment of the seeds. A print-out of the inventory list should also be included inside each seed box.

• Seed Vault data submission template instructions (Acrobat PDF)
• Seed Vault data submission template instructions (MS Word)
• Seed Vault data submission template (MS Excel)

Potatoes, Solanum tuberosum, photo CGIAR

If the file is zipped or compressed (file extension .zip or .gz) the files will be automatically unzipped by the data import routine. When reporting tab-separated values (.txt) or comma separated values (.csv), please follow the same descriptor names as outlined in the template. The order of the columns is less important, but do not alter the name of the columns! You may use underscore in the place of spaces in the descriptor names if this is useful for you. Please make sure not to report tabs or system characters inside the data values. Please do not include line breaks inside the data values.
You may of course also report using the MS Excel spreadsheet template as above, but the MS Excel format is no requirement.

Seed Portal of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault