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The first step in the process of conserving crop diversity in genebanks is to locate and collect this diversity, from farmers’ fields and from the wild. Starting with the global collecting work of Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov in the 1920’s, the world’s genebanks have identified varieties of crops and related species that were threatened or thought to be useful, collected them and conserved them, in order to develop, diversify, refine, or otherwise improve agriculture.

Collectors were also some of the first to recognize the decline in crop diversity, especially prevalent during the last half-century, due to the continuing move around the world from traditional to modern agriculture, and factors such as habitat destruction, desertification, and urbanization. Collecting has therefore taken on an added urgency, as genebank collections have increasingly become the sole remaining source of many traditional landraces and of some populations of wild species.

Collecting continues today, to identify diversity useful for agriculture before it is lost completely. Although the greater part of the diversity of many crops has probably been collected, some important crops have been neglected. For example, a mere 35% of the diversity of cassava has been collected. In addition, many of the wild species related to crops are not well represented in collections, and even today new species related to our major crops are being discovered and described. And in the past few decades a new threat has come to the forefront of collecting priorities. Climate change will increase the rate of extinction and has therefore produced an additional imperative for collecting. At the same time, collectors increasingly focus on the edges of the range of crops and their relatives, hitherto perhaps under-collected, in order to make available germplasm that will enable future crops to cope with changed, ever more extreme, climates,.

The Trust is partnering with scientists at the Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT) and Bioversity International to identify gaps in the collections of major crop genepools worldwide, and to develop a methodology to identify collecting priorities.. Currently, maps, databases and other information are available for the wild relatives of 13 globally important crops, and more will be added. Analyses for cultivated varieties (landraces) are also under development by CIAT researchers and others.


Award Scheme: Towards a more complete coverage of crop diversity in ex situ collections is now closed. Awards will be announced in due course.