Press and News What to board on the Ark?

Of the 7,000 edible species in the world today, one in seven is under threat. Since there aren’t enough resources to save all of them, policymakers need to decide which species to focus on. Bioversity International researchers Aurelia Samuel, Adam Drucker and Maarten van Zonneveld, together with colleagues from the University of Copenhagen and the Georg-August University, took up this challenge in a study published in Ecological Economics.

The authors applied the Weitzman approach – previously used to prioritize the conservation of wild animals and livestock – to clusters of cacao genotypes, using existing molecular marker data. Cacao was used as a case study because it is an important crop for smallholder farmers and also because its diversity has been well documented, including revealing signs of genetic erosion.

In Development of a cost-effective diversity-maximizing decision-support tool for in situ crop genetic resources conservation: the case of cacao, the authors estimate the maximum diversity that can be conserved using different clusters of cacao species.

They conclude that the Weitzman approach can indeed allow the outcomes of different plant genetic resources conservation strategies to be assessed according to their differentiated impacts on overall diversity. The identification of an appropriate choice of diversity and risk measures (such as inbreeding or climate change) is also shown to be a crucial first step in informing such assessments.

This story was featured in our 2013 Annual Report.
Read the entire Annual Report 2013 here