Sharing information

Gathering and sharing information about our agricultural biodiversity is vital to its conservation and use, for farmers, scientists, conservationists and breeders.

Standardising information to exchange plant resources.

Bioversity works to assist countries improve their capacity to describe, store, manage and share information about their plant resources, whether stored in genebanks or growing in their natural environments.

One important aspect of our work is developing standards for documentation and protocols to enable information sharing such as our Descriptor Lists and Derived Standards.

Systems for storing and sharing plant resource information

As information about our global agricultural biodiversity resources is gathered, managing information so it is easily shared and accessed is vital for the conservation and use of these resources.

Bioversity, working with international partners, has developed effective systems to manage this task including:

GENESYS

A project to bring together information held in hundreds of genebanks around the world. Benefits of this ambitious database which is based on standards developed by Bioversity and partners, will include a simple system for ordering samples as well as detailed information about available resources. GENESYS is part of the Global Information on Germplasm Accessions (GIGA) project.

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Collecting Missions

Bioversity International is home to 3200 unique original field report documents which are now available online.  This collection is an invaluable history of plants that may have been lost from their fields and natural habitats, painstakingly recording information about more than 200,000 landrace and crop wild relative samples collected all over the world for almost forty years.

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Working with international partners

We act as Secretariat for the European Centre for Plant Genetic Resources (ECPGR) which includes the European Genebank Integrated System (AEGIS) and EURISCO.