Chapter 42: Information, knowledge and agricultural biodiversity

Abstract

Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture include an estimated 7.4 million ex situ accessions conserved in genebank collections. An estimated 40% of these accessions are both electronically documented and freely available from online genebank data platforms such as Genesys (Alercia and Mackay, 2013; www.genesyspgr.org/) and EURISCO (FAO, 2010; Dias et al, 2011; http://eurisco.ipkgatersleben.de/). Approximately 21% of the world’s flora is classified as a crop wild relative and as such a potential gene donor for crops (Maxted and Kell, 2009). The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) (Telenius, 2011) integrates and provides extensive occurrence information about collection data, including genebank accessions ex situ and wild plants in situ, including many crop wild relatives. However, neither GBIF nor the genebank data portals focus on providing data on the molecular genetic diversity or conservation status of the collections. Some ex situ genebank accessions do provide associated measurement data from characterization and evaluation trials. However, the lack of easy access to experimental trait information online continues to be reported as a major limitation to the efficient use of plant genetic resources (FAO, 2010). Data on ex situ genebank collections, crop wild relative in situ populations, genetic data, and trait measurements are generally created and made available by different sub-groups of practitioners, and each sub-group has showed a tendency to develop its own documentation practices and data standards. This chapter will describe how knowledge organization principles can be used to create a more unified data landscape for agricultural biodiversity. It is concluded that the introduction of persistent and globally unique digital identifiers, resolvable to machine-readable information, and based on a standardized and formally declared data domain model is one of the fundamental first steps for an effective integration of agricultural biodiversity information (FAO, 2014). This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Routledge Handbook of Agricultural Biodiversity on 04.10.2017, available online: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Agricultural-Biodiversity/Hunter-Guarino-Spillane-McKeown/p/book/9780415746922