By Brandon Lim
January 14, 2026 · 3 min readSouth Korea sealed 7,000 seed samples from 92 crops inside a mountain vault in Bonghwa on July 3, 2025, the Rural Development Administration said, even as its breeders file hundreds of new varieties yearly.
The two facts sit side by side because new varieties and old seeds protect different kinds of plant diversity, and a country can gain one while quietly losing the other.
Korean breeders had filed 13,759 applications to protect new plant varieties by the end of 2024, covering 437 crops, the Ministry of Agriculture reported on January 22, 2025.
In 2024 alone, 518 new varieties entered the system, led by 49 roses, 42 peppers, and 35 chrysanthemums.
Eight crops, including the Andean root vegetable yacon, reached the Korean registry for the first time that year.
Plant scientists, however, count diversity in three separate ways: the number of bred varieties, the number of species, and the genetic variation hidden inside a single species.
A peach study published in Frontiers in Plant Science on November 6, 2025 shows why the third kind matters most for the future.
Researchers at the Rural Development Administration read the full genomes of 445 peach accessions, meaning stored plant lines, drawn from Korean landraces, Korean-bred cultivars, and trees brought in from China, the United States, and Japan.
The team found nearly 945,000 points where the genomes differed, yet the genetic distance between its ten clusters came out low, with an average divergence score of 0.088.
In plain terms, many peaches that look different on a market shelf share most of their DNA.
The researchers then picked 150 accessions that hold more than 99% of the total genetic variation, a compact set breeders can search for disease resistance or heat tolerance.
Two peaches bred for different colors may carry almost the same genes, while two plain-looking landraces may hide different versions of the genes that control flowering time or drought response.
The Bonghwa vault protects exactly that second kind of difference.
The July 2025 deposit included 2,394 barley samples, 669 wild soybeans, 332 peppers, and 139 perilla lines, stored 760 meters underground in bedrock.
Korea has used the vault for backup copies since 2020 and had stored 187,000 samples there by mid-2025, part of a national collection of about 283,000, the fifth largest in the world.
A second kind of growth complicates the picture.
Korea's list of alien plants, species that arrived through human activity, reached 804 taxa in an updated checklist published in Biological Invasions on October 13, 2025, up from 619 in the 2020 edition.
Part of that jump reflects a wider net, because the Korea National Arboretum team behind the count also tallied plants that slipped out of gardens and farms.
Of the 804, the authors classed 60 as invasive and 117 as showing notable spread or worse.
Nearly half, 381 taxa or 47.4%, still grow under cultivation in Korean gardens, farms, and parks.
The next invasive weed, in other words, may already stand in someone's flower bed, and the authors cautioned that climate change or human disturbance could push harmless newcomers across that line.
A rising species count can therefore mask a loss, because invaders that crowd out native plants make landscapes across the country look more alike.
That logic also explains why Korea ships ordinary seeds abroad.
In June 2025, the Rural Development Administration sent 4,000 samples of rice, soybean, adzuki bean, perilla, sesame, and radish to the Svalbard seed vault in Arctic Norway, part of an 11,206-sample deposit from 14 countries.
Perilla grows so widely in Korea that few people would call it endangered, yet a new pest, a war, or a shift in farming could still erase particular lines of it.
Charlotte Allender, head of the Warwick Genetic Resources Unit, said in the vault's announcement: "Crop genetic diversity is the raw material needed to create new crop varieties."
The most valuable seed in the vault may prove the one nobody has asked for yet.
