Meeting the demand for more and more nutritious food around the globe, particularly given climate change, and increased competition for land and water resources, is one of the most important global challenges of our time. Crop production needs to increase and more resilient crops need to be developed to provide food and agricultural products in a sustainable manner for a growing human population.
Assessing and identifying new sources of genetic variation is a critical part of any long-term strategy to enhance the productivity, sustainability and resilience of crop varieties and agricultural systems.
Approximately seven million crop accessions are being conserved in genebanks collections worldwide.
This resource represents one of the greatest, largely untapped, opportunities for accelerating yield gains and overcoming emerging crop productivity bottlenecks. However, to access and creatively utilize this wealth of diversity requires that the material be characterized using state of the art tools, technologies and methodologies, and that the data and information be subsequently shared in a form that is meaningful to users.
DivSeek was established to facilitate the generation, integration, and sharing of data and information related to plant genetic resources (PGR).