Research & reports

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) · FAO, Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture · Global

FAO's revised international technical standards guiding genebank management of plant genetic resources, covering orthodox seed, field, in vitro, and cryopreservation collections to ensure secure long-term conservation.

· Resources · Global

Reviews community seedbanks worldwide and classifies their multiple functions and services, including conservation, exchange, and sharing of seeds.

Pautasso M., Aistara G., Barnaud A., Caillon S., Clouvel P., Coomes O.T. · Agronomy for Sustainable Development · Global

Reviews concepts, methods, and challenges for understanding farmer seed exchange networks, central to conserving landraces and sustaining agrobiodiversity through informal social and ecological seed systems worldwide.

Westengen O.T., Jeppson S., Guarino L. · PLOS ONE · Global

Assesses the completeness of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault's safety-duplication collection against the world's ex-situ holdings, quantifying global backup of crop genetic diversity across 156 crop genera.

Maira Echeverry, Sebastián Gutiérrez, Julián Pineda, Nelson Ravelo · · Colombia

This account describes Barrio San Luis, an informal settlement on the eastern hills of Chapinero, Bogotá, Colombia, formed by rural-to-urban displacement and still undergoing legalization, where residents obtained services such as a community-run water system through collective organizing. It describes the Casa Taller Las Moyas, a project founded roughly seven years earlier to serve neighborhood children and youth left without care while parents work, offering workshops in baking, ceramics, crafts and urban agriculture in two daily shifts organized around school schedules; the text ends mid-sentence and provides no further data on the seed-conservation activities named in the title.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) · FAO, Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture · Global

FAO's comprehensive global assessment of trends in conserving and using plant genetic resources, documenting genetic erosion, genebank accessions, and policy needs for safeguarding crop diversity for food security.

Galluzzi G., Eyzaguirre P., Negri V. · Biodiversity and Conservation 19:3635-3654 · Global

Reviews home gardens worldwide as hotspots conserving high inter- and intra-specific genetic diversity, especially traditional crop varieties and landraces, linking agrobiodiversity conservation with cultural diversity and local knowledge.

van de Wouw M., Kik C., van Hintum T., van Treuren R., Visser B. · Plant Genetic Resources 8(1):1-15 · Global

Reviews the concept of genetic erosion in crops at the crop, variety and allele levels, analyzing the loss of diversity through replacement of landraces by modern cultivars and the research challenges involved.

cdoyle · · Ireland

Celebrity Chef Richard Corrigan visited the Letterkenny Community Gardens in Donegal, Ireland, during the County Enterprise Board’s ‘Enterprise Week’. He emphasized the importance of community involvement in growing healthy food and cultivating native, indigenous varieties.

Buchmann C. · Human Ecology · Cuba (Trinidad de Cuba)

Using ethnobotanical fieldwork in Trinidad de Cuba, this study shows how home gardens serve as the most adaptable local land resource, with garden composition and management adapting in response to major events such as the Soviet collapse, bolstering household food security and social-ecological resilience.

Pernilla Ouis, Ebba Lisberg Jensen · Malmö University Publications (Malmö University) · Sweden (Malmö)

This article examines the cultural parallelism between biological and cultural diversity as manifested in allotment garden areas in Malmö, Sweden, from a historical perspective. Using empirical data from interviews with allotment gardeners of different ethnic origins across Malmö, it shows how people bring their old plants and exchange varieties and species. This practice is argued to sometimes enhance contact and integration, and other times symbolize difference, contact with the country of origin, or ethnic identity.

María de los A Pino, Loracnis Hernández, María E Dominí, Arturo Ocampo Ramírez, Z. Terán, Eduardo Calves · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · Cuba

This study in San José de las Lajas and Arroyo Naranjo, Cuba, aimed to assess if participatory variety selection and farmer experimentation could introduce, adopt, and disseminate plant biodiversity in urban banana cultivation. Results demonstrated the potential of participatory methodologies to introduce and adopt materials from an agrobiodiversity fair, with selection differences based on criteria and municipal contexts. This provided initial evidence for such urban cultivation experiences.

Camacho Villa T. C., Maxted N., Scholten M., Ford-Lloyd B. · Plant Genetic Resources 3(3):373-384 · Global

A foundational paper proposing a working definition of a landrace as a dynamic, locally adapted, genetically diverse population with historical origin, lacking formal crop improvement and tied to traditional farming systems.

María de los A Pino, María E Dominí, A. Ramírez, Loracnis Hernández, Marı́a Rosa Ponce, Eduardo Calves, Z. Terán, Ania Yong, H. Ríos · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · Cuba

This study demonstrated the feasibility of applying participatory plant breeding as a means for urban farmers to access agricultural diversity, through experimentation with participatory methodologies in an urban context. Local actors from the municipalities of San José de las Lajas and Arroyo Naranjo were also involved, leading to the establishment of a working methodology and an increase in diversity for tomato, bean, plantain, and lettuce crops. Training was also provided on the management of these crops, biofertilizers, and artisanal conservation of this diversity.

Tripp R., Louwaars N. · Food Policy · Global

Analyzes how seed laws and regulatory systems shape farmers' freedom over their own seed and informal seed systems, presenting policy choices for reforming seed regulation in developing countries.

Brush S. B. · Crop Science 35(2):346-354 · Global

A foundational paper presenting three cases of ongoing farmer maintenance of landraces—potatoes in the Peruvian Andes, maize in southern Mexico and wheat in western Turkey—and the rationale for in situ conservation.