In-situ conservation

The two strategies

Conservation biology distinguishes:

Ex-situ conservation. Storing samples — frozen seeds, dried specimens, frozen tissue or DNA, living plants in botanical gardens, living animals in zoos — outside the species’ natural habitat. Ex-situ is good for rapid backup, for protecting samples against in-situ catastrophe, for making material available to breeders and researchers. Major ex-situ facilities include the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Kew Millennium Seed Bank, the CGIAR network of international crop gene banks, the Berlin Botanical Garden, and many national gene banks.

In-situ conservation. Maintaining the species in its natural habitat or continuing agricultural context. For wild species this means protecting their habitats. For crop species this means continuing cultivation by farmers — particularly by Indigenous and smallholder farmers maintaining traditional landraces. The Quechua [[seed-keeping|Parque de la Papa]] in the Andes is a canonical in-situ conservation site for potato; the [[indo-gangetic-plain|Indo-Gangetic Plain]]‘s smallholder rice landrace networks are in-situ rice conservation; the Maya criollo-maize networks across Yucatán are in-situ maize conservation.

Why both are necessary

Ex-situ alone is insufficient because:

• It freezes the genome in time. A potato sample collected in 1980 and stored at the International Potato Center is exactly the potato of 1980. Forty years of subsequent adaptation to changing climate, new pest pressure, and field conditions are absent from the frozen sample.
• It depends on continuous institutional capacity. Gene banks require electricity, building maintenance, taxonomic expertise, regeneration cycles. The Aleppo ICARDA gene bank — the largest collection of Fertile Crescent founder-crop wild relatives — was evacuated under fire during the Syrian civil war; substantial material survived only because backup copies had been sent to Svalbard.
• It is decoupled from continued farming. Material in a gene bank is not in farmers’ hands; the farmers’ knowledge of how to use it is not in the gene bank. The two need each other.

In-situ alone is insufficient because:

• Habitats and farming systems can be destroyed. A Maya milpa community that loses its land loses the in-situ seed-keeping it was performing.
• Long-term backup against in-situ catastrophe is needed. Ex-situ samples are the insurance against in-situ loss.

The robust framework combines both. The Parque de la Papa explicitly maintains a relationship with the International Potato Center — in-situ Quechua-Aymara seed-keeping in the living fields, cross-referenced with ex-situ samples at CIP. When a particular cultivar’s in-situ population is threatened, CIP can return material from its ex-situ collection; when a particular CIP cultivar has been replaced by a more-adapted descendant in farmers’ fields, the farmers’ updated version is reintroduced into the CIP collection.

The political dimension

In-situ conservation depends on the continuing existence of the communities doing the conservation. The Andean Quechua and Aymara seed-keepers, the West African yam-keepers, the Indian Beej Bachao seed-savers, the Indigenous Amazonian seed-keepers, the Bangladeshi Bengal rice-landrace farmers — these are the people doing global agricultural-genetic conservation, largely unrecognized and unpaid for that work. The contemporary in-situ-conservation framework increasingly recognizes that supporting these communities’ land rights, livelihoods, and political autonomy is itself the central conservation work.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Shares approach with: [[seed-keeping]] · [[indigenous-led-conservation]] · [[crop-wild-relatives]]

Sources

• Brush, Stephen B., Farmers’ Bounty: Locating Crop Diversity in the Contemporary World (2004)
• IIED, The Custodians of Biodiversity (2013)
• Convention on Biological Diversity, Article 8 — in-situ conservation
• Wikipedia — In-situ conservation

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A concept entry in the 0mn1.one wiki.