The job of understanding agricultural biodiversity doesn’t stop once the plant or seed has been discovered.

What is discovered must be given a name. It must be a unique title, lest the same plant be known by a completely different name somewhere else. Its common, everyday designation may very likely be not one but several names. The plant most of us like to eat in the summertime is “maize” in some places and “corn” in others. To make matters even more complicated, there are some parts of the world where what we know as “wheat” is called “corn.” The situation is even more confusing with fish, which tend to have lots of local names.

Officially, though, each plant has a two-word “scientific” or “Latin” name that is accepted everywhere. That way, scientists corresponding by e-mail or reading each other’s scientific articles will know precisely what plant one another’s talking about. (The naming system exists for animals, too, whether they’re really big (an African elephant is known as Loxodonta africana) or really small (ladybugs, also known as lady birds and ladybird beetles, are members of the family Coccinellidae).

The newly-found plants must also be classified, which means sorted into some sort of logical structure, much like putting papers that represent different parts of a project into separate file folders.

Conservation is the key.
None of this work really matters unless the plant material is then conserved. “Conservation” may sound like little more than “saving.” You can put your favorite snapshots into an old shoebox and consider them conserved. But with plant biodiversity, conservation means a lot more. A bag of seeds or a growing plant must be protected, saved under conditions that favor its continued good health, and managed in a way so that it, and information about it, are not misplaced. Often, conserving a plant means conserving the environment in which it likes to grow, too.

Not too long ago, scientists and home gardeners conserved germplasm (seeds and plant shoots) largely because they wanted to keep a favorite variety around for future eating — brussels sprouts from New York’s Long Island that had a specially delicious taste, or eggplant that was long and slender rather than the fat, less tasty sort found in supermarkets. But as early as the 1930s, some researchers warned of what they called “genetic erosion.”

This erosion of genetic variety has proceeded at a wild pace. Those Long Island brussels sprouts are almost impossible to find now. One survey of genetic erosion by the U.S. Department of Agriculture revealed that there were more than 7,000 varieties of apples in use between 1804 and 1904. By the end of the 20th century, some 86 percent of those varieties had been lost to genetic erosion. At the same time, 94 percent of the pea varieties and 81 percent of the tomato varieties had vanished.

As we shall see, this rapid genetic erosion caused great concern in the world scientific community. Governments and private scientific organizations have taken great steps to conserve germplasm in numerous ways. And the world’s leaders have finally acknowledged that without thoughtful conservation of our biodiversity — especially the biodiversity we eat — Earth and her population cannot continue to grow. The big buzzword became “sustainable use,” meaning we should use our diversity, but only in a sustainable manner, in a way so that it can constantly be replenished.

When nations of the world gathered in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro at what has become popularly known as the Earth Summit, one of the themes that ran through all their declarations was the need to develop programs “for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity.”

That dream has not yet been realized, but science is hard at work to make it a reality.

Continue to Classification and different forms of conservation.