Workshop on sharing resources among genebanks and conservation sites
17-19 March 2020 (online)
Workshop on innovative ways of sharing resources and services among genebanks and conservation sites organized by IDELE, France.
Experts from the animal, crops and forest domains shared their experiences to learn from each other and see what can work across domains.
The workshop considered four broad areas.
- What can we share among our domains? Communication is ripe for sharing. We could join forces to reach a wider audience and also for training and education among practitioners. There is also scope to share data and information, including data models and shared infrastucture, analytical techniques, and policy and science. We also considered strategic elements, such as shared planning for better complementarity of in situ and ex situ conservation.
- What are the constraints on sharing? In common with other workshops held during the GenResBridge project, we identified “cultural” differences across the three domains to be an important constraint. These cultural differences include terminology, objectives, the ways material is used and others.
- What did we learn from other domains? Animal Genetic Resources currently does not use genebank material to create new breeds, analogous to prebreeding in plants; this, they felt, would be worth investigating. For Forest Genetic Resources, defining conservation targets, as is done in AnGR and PGR, could be a future focus. Plant Genetic Resources learned from exchanges with AnGR and FGR that conservation objectives should not be limited to food security.
- What can we improve within our domain? AnGR agreed that progress could be made in organizing the ex-situ in-vitro network (EUGENA). FGR should undertake further work to assess the minimum targets for ex situ conservation. PGR needs to make efforts to improve the awareness of what is already conserved, in order to avoid redundancy.
Webinars
These webinars were organized in the context of the workshop.
Sean Hoban 'Conserving genetic diversity in botanic gardens: calculating how much to conserve'
In this webinar, Sean Hoban from the Morton Arboretum in Illinois introduces the challenge for an efficient and effective collection strategy to safeguard the high genetic and ecological diversity in as few samples as possible, providing scientifically grounded recommendations for the number of individuals that need to be conserved, and how to collect from the wild and manage collections over time. More information here
Chris Cockel on “The Role of Botanic Gardens in Ex situ Seed Conservation – Perspectives from Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank”
The Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK, opened in 2000, but the first concerted effort to collect the seeds of wild plant species by Kew took place in the 1960s, with the seed conservation function transferred to Kew’s botanic garden at Wakehurst Place in West Sussex in 1973. By 2009, 10% of the world orthodox seed flora had been banked at the MSB. At the start of 2020 the seed of over 40,000 species from 190 countries and territories has been conserved in over 95,000 seed collections, totalling over 2.3 billion individual seeds. Three important seed conservation projects will be highlighted as case studies to illustrate the role that a botanic garden can play in plant genetic resource conservation and research, both ex situ and in situ – the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change (Crop Wild Relatives) Project, the UK National Tree Seed Project, and the Garfield Weston Global Tree Seed Bank Project.
