Won’t survive the bulldozers (Image: Chip Litherland/The New York Times/Redux/Eyevine)

The world’s largest scientific repository of fruits and berries, outside St Petersburg, Russia, could be bulldozed later this year to make way for new homes.

This week Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust in Rome, Italy, called for scientists to intervene to prevent “the largest intentional, preventable loss of crop diversity in my lifetime – during the International Year of Biodiversity”.

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and President Dmitry Medvedev have so far not responded to pleas to save the collection at the Pavlovsk experimental station. Staff there say the last chance to prevent …