A central part of the conservation work is good documentation. A regional approach on documentation reduces overall costs and improves documentation quality. The Nordic Gene Bank (NGB) is the centre for a distributed regional network on conservation and utilization of Plant Genetic Resources (PGR) in the Nordic countries. The northern region shares many unique ecogeographic and environmental conditions and a joint regional conservation strategy makes sense.

To analyze PGR material and decide on the appropriate conservation strategy, correct and complete data needs to be accessible. Most gene banks around the world have developed their own specialized local documentation systems to meet these demands. SESTO, the Nordic regional gene bank documentation system, was developed at the NGB. The application is now under expansion to serve the gene banks of the whole region. The main function of SESTO is management of data on the plant material conserved as frozen seeds by the gene banks. The application is published online as a public web page. Please visit us at http://www.ngb.se/sesto/. The gene banks included in SESTO share data like for example the taxonomic species database, the common picture archive and the contact institutes and persons.

The experiences from the cooperation between NGB, the Baltic gene banks, and the Vavilov Institute on conservation and documentation will be used as model for the establishment of similar networks under development in Central Asia and Caucasus (CAC) region, East Africa (EAPGREN) and Balkan (SEEDNET) financed by the Swedish Development Aid Agency (SIDA). SESTO is open source software and freely available to other gene banks and genetic resources networks. A copy of the SESTO system is already installed in IPK-Gatersleben and in the Vavilov Institute.