For the cultivated diversity of the future

The project "For the cultivated diversity of the future: Rethinking the long-term preservation of cultivated plants and their history" will develop new methods for how supplementary collections and innovative conservation can take place for the cultivated diversity with a focus on older culturally valuable plants. The project will also collect and conserve the new criteria and evaluate them. Gotland has a rich cultural history of cultivated diversity and has been chosen as model area to work in.

The programme for diversity of cultivated plants, Pom, started its operations in 2020. The program is Sweden's national effort to preserve and use the country's cultural plants in the long term. During the program's early years, a national inventory work focused on collecting culturally historically interesting garden plants. After evaluating the tips that came in, the most valuable plant material was selected to be preserved in two genebanks, the National Gene Bank for Vegetatively Propagated Horticultural Plants and NordGen.

Based on the The Swedish Board of Agriculture's report "Programmet för odlad mångfald: samarbete för hållbarhet (2019:25)" the conservation work is now entering a new phase. It has been shown that there are plant groups as well as geographical areas of the country that are poorly represented in the genebanks. In order to supplement the collections, new inventories and collection methods are required, as well as new innovative ideas about how plant material with its cultural history can be preserved and how knowledge about plants can be passed on.

The current project wishes to develop methods and criteria for how this can be implemented. Based on a geographically defined area and in collaboration with local actors within cultivated diversity, the project wants to develop a model for how this can be done. In this project, Gotland has been chosen as the work area. After the end of the project, the results and experiences may be applied to other areas in the country, e.g. in the coastal and inland areas of northern Sweden. 

Project partners:

SLU

Pom/The National Gene Bank for Vegetatively Propagated Horticultural Plants

NordGen