Tor Myking
Head of Department/Head of Research
Abstract
The value of genetic resources in agriculture is hard to overestimate as they are decisive for food safety, provide options for adaptation of future diet needs, and underpin a vast amount of biodiversity. To enable an effective conservation of these resources, we need knowledge about where they are located. The EU project GenRes Bridge showed that this knowledge is indeed modest at the European level. A source of genetic resources with particular potential for use in agriculture, e.g. related to the future adaptation to climate change, are crop wild relatives (CWR). Crop wild relatives are plant species categorized as wild relatives of cultivated plants and are used here as an indicator of genetic resources in the landscape. We therefore wanted to explore new ways of identifying hotspots of genetic resources, highlighting the landscape as a starting point. It is well established that landscape heterogeneity is closely related to biodiversity, although to our knowledge studies hitherto have rarely looked at the relation between landscape and genetic resources. Focusing on crop wild relatives, used here as an indicator for genetic resources in the landscape, we wanted to assess whether we could identify how landscape variation in topography and land cover has consequences for the spatial distribution of genetic resources that may be important in the future development of agriculture. Here we report the results from this pilot study where we have tested whether there is a correlation between landscape heterogeneity and agricultural genetic resources, using 5 x 5 km grid cells as spatial units. We used the presence of the crop wild relatives (CWR) which are prioritized for conservation in Norway as indicators of agricultural genetic resource diversity and extracted landscape heterogeneity descriptors from publicly available sources. The results from our study do suggest that landscape diversity could be a path worth following in searching for these resources in the landscape, and thus also important in decision-making on planning and management in these diverse landscapes.
Authors
Todora Rogelja Laura Secco Francoise Lefevre Egbert Beuker Marjana Westergren Bruno Fady Santiago C. González-Martínez Tor Myking Luc E. Pâques Christian Rellstab Giuseppe Giovanni Vendramin Thibaud Chauvin Marcela Van Loo Ulla Ovaska Jacopo Giacomoni Anže Japelj Anna-Maria Farsakoglou Heino Konrad Sofia Caiolo Aurore Desgroux D. E. Kjær Jo Van Brusselen Mauro MasieroAbstract
Kartlegging av sentrale aktører i forvaltningen av trærnes genressurser
Authors
Tor MykingAbstract
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