Developing Crop Descriptor Lists

The world faces a continual need to increase crop productivity, and to develop new varieties more adapted to changing environmental and biological challenges or to meet the evolving needs of local communities. To meet these needs and challenges, farmers and breeders not only must have access to a wide range of plant genetic resources but also must have access to the essential information about those plant genetic resources that will allow effective use to be made of them. These guidelines have been developed to assist genebank curators, breeders, plant scientists, national programmes, networks and users of genetic resources working with specific crops and gene pools to develop their own descriptor lists in order to characterize their material and make information available to others in a systematic and unambiguous form.