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 new 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.

Working with international partners

Bioversity hosts The System-wide Genetic Resources Programme (SGRP), which maintains the 11 genebanks managed by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research Centres (CGIAR). We are also an active participant within the SGRP in negotiations for the implementation of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

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