Figures

Nikolai Vavilov

nik-oh-LYE vah-VEE-lof

Botanist

Citation Formats

General Reference

Agriculture and Farming Atlas. "Nikolai Vavilov." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/figures/nikolai-vavilov.

APA Style

Agriculture and Farming Atlas. (n.d.). Nikolai Vavilov. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/figures/nikolai-vavilov

BibTeX

@misc{agricultureandfarmingatlas-nikolai-vavilov,
  author = {Agriculture and Farming Atlas},
  title = {Nikolai Vavilov},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/figures/nikolai-vavilov},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist who mapped where the world's crops were born and gathered their diversity against the day it would be needed. His centers-of-origin theory, first published in 1924, and his Leningrad collection, the world's largest seed bank at over 148,000 specimens by 1933, founded crop conservation; during the Siege of Leningrad his staff guarded a quarter million samples while starving. Vavilov himself, denounced under Lysenko's ascendancy, died in a Saratov prison in 1943, the man who banked the seeds dying of hunger. His name is on the centers, the institute and the moral ledger of this science.

Facts

Birth Year

1887 1

Death Year

1943 1

Died in prison in Saratov; the medical record names pneumonia, dystrophy and edema, and some sources state starvation as the actual cause. Carried as recorded, not smoothed.

Nationality

Russian and Soviet 1

Defining Contribution

Identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants and built the Leningrad seed bank, the world's largest, founding modern crop diversity conservation 1

Cross-Tradition Connections