About ARCAD

Crop biodiversity: one of the developing world’s greatest agricultural challenges

By 2050, it is estimated that the world population will reach nine billion. Much of this growth is predicted to occur in regions with tropical and Mediterranean climates. Ensuring sustainable food supplies for a population of this size while meeting biodiversity, environmental and energy requirements in these regions is clearly one of the major challenges facing agriculture in the 21st century. Over 10,000 years ago, our ancestors began domesticating wild plants to create crops capable of producing a more regular, predictable source of food. Taking advantage of existing plant biodiversity, they selected useful plant characteristics, such as disease and drought resistance, as well as grain or fruit traits.

Crop biodiversity is vital to our societies. But the effects that humans and nature exert on crops can have unintended consequences for their biodiversity. And without sufficient biodiversity, crops are unable to adapt or be adapted by farmers and breeders to environmental or climate changes, hence putting the world’s food supply at risk.

However, crop biodiversity is not sufficiently studied or understood. We do not know exactly how diverse crops are. Nor do we know how they became as “diverse” as they are today.

To nourish the future, it is therefore important to conserve crop biodiversity today and ensure it is sustainable by examining it at every level ― from genes to populations ― to understand how domesticated plants have adapted to human and environmental pressures over time. This is the mission of ARCAD.

Creating a center for innovation in agrobiodiversity

ARCAD (Agropolis Resource Center for Crop Conservation, Adaptation and Diversity) is a flagship programme of Agropolis Fondation , a French scientific foundation established in 2007 dedicated to promoting and supporting agricultural sciences for sustainable development. The foundation’s charter members ― CIRAD, INRA, IRD and Montpellier SupAgro ― are four of France’s top institutions in this field.

Jointly developed by these charter members and by University of Montpellier 2, ARCAD will set up a multi-function resource center for agricultural biodiversity (or agrobiodiversity ) in Montpellier, France, which is home to many of the world’s leading research teams specializing in plant biotechnology, evolutionary biology, crop genomics and genetic resources in Mediterranean and African regions. It will develop an integrated set of biological, knowledge and training resources while building on the expertise and its network of partners.

In 2009, Agropolis Fondation provided €3 million to fund ARCAD’s scientific component (i.e. research and training). The Languedoc-Roussillon Region pledged €5 million to build ARCAD facilities at La Valette  campus, north of Montpellier.

Agrobiodiversity preservation and exploration: going beyond the freezer

The scientific ambition of ARCAD is to understand crop biodiversity by examining how human societies and environment have moulded it over time. Because it is unavoidably linked to complex factors, crop biodiversity cannot be understood by simply studying plant samples in a museum or conserving seeds in a freezer. It requires:

• A combination of laboratory work, field research and computational analysis.
• Collaboration between different disciplines, such as genetics, agronomy, ecology and anthropology, to generate and integrate knowledge on crop biodiversity at various levels and scales, from genes to agricultural ecosystems.
• Leveraging recent technological advances in genome analysis, phenotype characterization and data management (including bioinformatics and geographical information systems).
• Dialogue and knowledge sharing between stakeholders involved in the preservation and use of agrobiodiversity.
• The use of diverse plant materials, obtained from germplasm collections maintained by the Foundation’s charter members or other institutions, or collected in agricultural ecosystems in compliance with local and international regulations.

The results of ARCAD’s work will help find new and better ways to preserve the genetic resources of crops and use them to develop sustainable agriculture. In particular, ARCAD will study how crops have responded to climate change events in their lifecycle, examine the evolutionary history of crop genomes, and apply advanced knowledge on crops to the biodiversity and adaptive potential of cereals in Africa.

An unmatched collection of resources and expertise

ARCAD brings cutting-edge science to bear on the legacy of the world’s farmers to create as well as make resources and knowledge on crops available to farmers, agronomists and conservationists working in Mediterranean and African regions.

Its four main components are:

Research:  ARCAD’s primary scientific work focuses on the relationship between crop biodiversity, crop domestication and adaptation to agricultural environments. By studying the history and patterns of crop domestication and adaptation, it will show how genes, genomes and populations of cultivated plants have been shaped by centuries of farming as well as environmental and societal changes. ARCAD’s research will examine urgent questions, such as those pertaining to crop adaptation to climate change and management of crop biodiversity by farmers in various farming systems in the Southern hemisphere. More about ARCAD's projects

Resources:  ARCAD will be an open platform for the conservation, management and analysis of genetic and genomic resources. It will provide facilities for seed conservation, germplasm cryopreservation and a DNA bank for Mediterranean and tropical crops. It will contribute to data production and analysis by creating tools and methods to analyze crop biodiversity (genomics, biostatistics, bioinformatics, social sciences including linguistics and ethnobotany).

Capacity building:  ARCAD will provide demand-oriented training for members of the scientific and agricultural communities in tropical and Mediterranean regions. It will benefit from the existing educational opportunities offered by universities and agricultural schools in Montpellier. More about training

Facilities:  To enable the work of its scientific projects, ARCAD will gather its research teams under one roof. A new building dedicated to research laboratories and conservation facilities complementing existing technical platforms will be constructed at the La Valette  campus.

Working together to preserve, explore and use agrobiodiversity

Partnership:  ARCAD was born out of a partnership between several research teams in Montpellier. Its scientific endeavours will be conducted in collaboration with other international research teams. Once built, the ARCAD facility will also boost the region’s capacity to host researchers and students from around the world. More about ARCAD's partners

Knowledge sharing: The Montpellier scientific community is one of the world’s leading centers for crop sciences. ARCAD is expected not only to contribute to reinforcing this expertise but also to facilitating knowledge sharing on agrobiodiversity.All information and tools developed by ARCAD will be in English or French and will be made available either free-of-charge or at a reasonable cost. All data will comply with international standards. All software will be developed under some form of open source license, such as GPL (General Public License).

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