The Millennium Seed Bank Project, run by the Royal Botanical Garden, in Kew, England, aims to collect seeds from 10 percent of the world’s flowering plant species and to stow them in a sort of climate-controlled Noah’s Ark against the possibility of depletion, whether by climate change, alien-species invasion, overdevelopment or apocalypse.

The project has received seeds from 100 countries and every imaginable ecosystem, from the palm forests of Madagascar to the tundra of Alaska.