In the year 2000, The Millenium Seed Bank Project was launched as an international effort to preserve the biodiversity of Earth’s plant life by collecting, cataloging, and storing seeds from around the world.

The motivation was simple. All animal life depends upon plants, and plants depend upon seeds. so the Project serves as something of an insurance policy to protect plants from extinction and preserve them for the future by storing them in underground, frozen vaults.

Headquartered in West Sussex, England, the goals of the project are ambitious: to collect 10 percent of the world’s dryland flora — 24.000 species — by 2010, including seeds from all of the UK’s native flora. In addition, the Project serves as a focal point for research into the conservation and preservation of seeds, and has done much to increase public awareness of the need to preserve plant biodiversity.

By 2007, the project had banked its one-billionth seed. In 2009, that number has grown to over three billion.

This week’s Friday Night at the Movies features a short, 6-minute talk by Jonathan Drori on The Millenium Seed Project and the need to preserve biodiversity of plants, even if it means doing it one seed at a time.

Jonathan Drori: Why We’re Storing Billions of Seeds