Conservation of crop wild relatives featured in New Agriculturist

The cutting edge conservation work of CIAT and sister-center Bioversity International features in the latest edition of the online development magazine New Agriculturist, published today.

The article focuses on the centers’ efforts to track down endangered crop wild relatives – the ancestors of today’s domesticated crops – in order to conserve the important genetic material they contain.

In the article, CIAT’s Andy Jarvis describes the importance of the work, as well as the pioneering data modeling techniques used to locate likely sites of wild species – work that resulted in him winning theGBIF Ebbe Nielsen Award for Bioinformatics in 2009. The article also looks at the use of the so-called “gap analysis” technique to target the collection of genetic material under-represented in gene banks.

Click to read Model Behaviour – the race to conserve crop wild relatives.