I took my own advice and followed Africa Agriculture GIS Week on both the live video feed and Twitter yesterday, in particular the session on the CGIAR. Very interesting stuff going on all over the place, but you do have to wonder about communication within the system. Because on the one hand you have the CGIAR pulling together and mapping their and other people’s genebank data in the monumental effort that is GeneSys. And on the other you have CIMMYT producing a very neat online Wheat Atlas. And did really nobody think of putting the two together? I guess that’s one of the reasons why the CGIAR needs restructuring.
GeneSys confused me. The list of crops seems to be the restrictive FAO Seed Treaty list, although searches show a lot more. It is still a mess, try Lycopersicum versus Lycopersicon, and where are all the field collections of tropical crops? But I note it is at an early stage.
I was a member of the TAC Stripe Review of genetic resources in the the CG in the early 90s. I argued the need for a CG-wide crop data base and suggested it could be managed either by CIMMYT or IRRI (they had and still have the best experience). I was over-ruled and SINGER was the result (now part of the USDA GRIN?). What went wrong?
Nearly 20 years later, I am not sure that master databases serve any real practical purpose for crop improvement – although detailed crop-specific ones (CIMMYT and IRRI again) certainly do.
As for restructuring the CG, the centre with the best crop specific database (IRRI again) got a major part of the biggest and first CG `megaprogram’: GRiSP on rice.