UK Biodiversity Indicator C9b, Plant genetic resources - Enrichment Index

• Published by: Joint Nature Conservation Committee
• Last updated: 17 May 2018
• Topic: Environment
• Licence: Open Government Licence ; View licence information

Summary

This spreadsheet is the underlying data for the biodiversity indicator C9b, Plant genetic resources - Enrichment Index.

The UK is relatively rich in wild relatives of crops, landraces of cereal, vegetable and fruit crops, and traditional orchard trees. Maintaining genetic diversity of UK plants is important for conservation of biological diversity, as well as for economic and cultural reasons. The UK is a Party to the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, and has also committed to a five-point action plan in response to the Foresight (2011) report on the future of food and farming (Environmental Audit Committee 2011) which includes actions on conserving plant genetic resources.

The indicator presents the genetic diversity of cultivated plants and their wild relatives in the UK, including other socio-economically and culturally valuable plant species, by assessing the genetic diversity of target plants held in UK germplasm collections. Effectively, it is a measure of the status of ex situ conservation of cultivated plants and their wild relatives in the UK. Any plant which grows in or is cultivated in the UK, or has grown in or has been cultivated in the UK, could be included in the indicator.

The indicator is based on an Enrichment Index developed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO 2010) to describe the enhancement of ex situ plant germplasm collections. The method factors in duplication and similarity to existing accessions. An upward trending line indicates diversity is being added to collections - the steeper the line, the greater the diversity being incorporated. A horizontal line indicates no accessions, and hence no diversity, being added, and a downward trending line indicates diversity is being lost from collections. The total number of accessions illustrates the yearly collection effort added to the genetic resources institutes, without taking into account genetic diversity within those collections. Note, not all accessions of target species are included in the Enrichment Index, as some were excluded due to poor or insufficient data. Full calculation procedures are provided in the technical background paper.

This is one of a suite of 24 UK biodiversity indicators published by JNCC on behalf of Defra; the latest publication date was 19 January 2016 - for indicator C9b the latest data are for 2015. The supporting technical document details the methodology used to create the indicator.

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Data links

Link to the data	Format	File added	Data preview
page-6573	N/A	17 May 2018	Not available

Additional information

View additional metadata

• Added to data.gov.uk: 2018-05-17
• Access contraints: No limitations
• Harvest GUID: 04a135e5-1f79-42bc-b287-473e959293df
• Extent: Latitude: 61.0° to 49.77°
• Extent: Longitude: -8.65° to 2.0°
• Dataset reference date: 2016-01-19 (publication)
• Responsible party: Digital and Data Solutions, JNCC (distributor)
• ISO 19139 resource type: dataset
• Metadata language: eng
• Source Metadata: XML
• Source Metadata: HTML

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Licence information

Released under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Attribution statement "Contains public sector information from the EURISCO Catalogue http://eurisco.ipk-gatersleben.de/apex/f?p=103:1; date of data consultation 16 November 2015; based on UK contributions from: Genetic Resources Unit, Aberystwyth; Heritage Seed Library, Garden Organic; Germplasm Resources Unit, John Innes Centre; Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Centre; Millennium Seed Bank Partnership; Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture, Scottish Government; and Warwick Crop Centre, Genetic Resources Unit. Background information provided by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Licenced under the Open Government Licence v3.0"