Forages 2020

The project includes three main tasks:

1. work towards the establishment of the European forage collection in accordance with the AEGIS goals;
2. inventory of evaluation and characterization data on European forage accessions;
3. development of a new workplan for the ECPGR Forages Working Group.

The management group had three Skype meetings, one in March, one in June and one in October.

Project Workshop

The project workshop was held 9-11 November 2015 at NordGen in Alnarp, Sweden. It included 4 sessions: 1) AEGIS, 2) Crop wild relatives,
3) Characterization and evaluation data and 4) Workplan development. The current status was evaluated and discussed. Substantial progress has been made in the development of the European Forage Collection, since the Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the UK have flagged forage accessions in EURISCO. In important forage genera such as Trifolium, Festuca, Lolium and Poa, more than 1000 accessions have been flagged in each genus. The number of flagged forage accessions for the European Collection is also expected to increase in the future. The selection process has been initiated in Belgium, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and, in addition, countries that have already initiated the process plan to flag additional forage accessions in the future.
The workplan for the coming years was extensively discussed and developed. Targets were set towards AEGIS-related goals (including development of crop-specific genebank standards for forages), quantity and quality of data in EURISCO (both passport data and characterization and evaluation data) and on in situ conservation of forage crops.

• Agenda and list of participants (310,3 KB)
• Presentations given at the workshop