Agrobiodiversity: The Importance of Inventories in the Assessment of Crop Diversity and Its Time and Spatial Changes

Abstract

In general, the absence of detailed knowledge of world biodiversity prevents the application of the methodological tools that could successfully assist in biodiversity conservation. Inventories are seen as a first step to assessing the biodiversity with respect to its richness and distribution patterns and to monitor its changes. Nevertheless, currently no comprehensive global inventory of species diversity exists. Our knowledge of biodiversity encompasses only 20 % of the total estimated number of species. Similar gaps could also be identified in the current understanding of crop diversity with a particular emphasis on the intraspecific diversity where a wide and comprehensive inventory is urgently required. Surveys are pivotal for the accumulation of knowledge required to populate agrobiodiversity inventories that are essential tools for creating effective mechanisms to monitor changes in the crop diversity and to estimate genetic erosion of predominantly threatened components of diversity, i.e., landraces. Our work aims to review the current state of agrobiodiversity inventories with particular emphasis on crop species and their intraspecific diversity. The complexity of crop diversity and the limitations of our knowledge with that respect are discussed. The need of inventorying and surveying at the species and below-species levels is reviewed. The ambiguity of landraces definition, which is a major component of intraspecific crop diversity, along with the distinct needs to design and execute their inventory strategies is debated. Crop diversity has a prospective use for agriculture and food production sustainability, crop improvement or crop adaptation to climatic changes, and therefore needs to be inventoried and protected against erosion and extinction. Finally, we present some inceptive attempts to advance ex situ and in situ landrace inventories.