Millennium Seed Bank Partnership

The storage facilities consist of large underground frozen vaults preserving the world's largest wild-plant seedbank or collection of seeds from wild species.

Major partnerships exist on all the continents, enabling the countries involved to meet international objectives such as the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation and the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations Environment Programme.

[7] The main aims of the project[8] are to: There are over 100 partnerships worldwide,[1] including Australia, Mexico, Chile, Kenya, China, United States, Jordan, Mali, Malawi, Madagascar, Burkina Faso, Botswana, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and South Africa.

The collections are immediately moved to a dry room until processing can be conducted where the seeds are cleaned of debris and other plant material, X-rayed, counted, and banked at −20 °C (−4 °F).

Seeds are banked in hermetically sealed glass containers along with silica gel packets impregnated with indicator compounds that change colour if moisture seeps into the collection.

If it has the legal permission to do so, the MSB can then provide up to 60 seeds for free, to bona fide, non-commercial organisations for the purposes of research, restoration, and reintroduction.