Collecting Missions

 Photo by Polina Rytova on Unsplash

An agricultural heritage of cultivated plants and their wild relatives

Bioversity International is home to 3200 unique original field report documents. 

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.

Not only are all these records now available online through the collecting mission file repository, but the passport data has also been extracted from all these documents and been made available online in the Collecting Missions Database. Most of this germplasm is still available in genebanks worldwide, and can be accessed through Genesys

You can search by species, country, collector’s name or mission title, and access directly the original field records plus other information such as where that sample is housed in genebanks worldwide. Other websites and applications can use and integrate data from Bioversity’s collecting database through inbuilt web services and a Google map.

Explore the database on genesys

Read more about the history of collecting missions.