J Trevor Williams (1938–2015): IBPGR director and genetic conservation pioneer

Abstract

John Trevor Williams (always known as Trevor), who was Executive Secretary and first Director of the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR) between 1978 and 1990, passed away at the age of 76 on 30 March 2015 at his home in Cheshire, UK after a long respiratory illness. One legacy of Trevor’s contribution to the conservation of plant genetic resources can be found deep beneath the Arctic permafrost on the island of Spitsbergen, where millions of seeds of crop varieties and wild species—many collected through the efforts of IBPGR in the 1970s and 1980s—are in backup storage in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), popularly known as the ‘Doomsday Vault’. Opened 7 years ago, the SGSV is one major achievement of a plan set in motion three decades earlier by IBPGR to establish an international network of regional and national genebanks. The proposal to store backup samples of international genebank collections under the permafrost was first developed by IBPGR in 1988 (IBPGR 1990, p. 10), building on the experience of the Nordic Genebank that had already used an abandoned coal mine on Svalbard for the same purpose.