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INCREASE

Growing Biodiversity Together: How Citizen Science Drives Europe’s Legume Future

Growing Biodiversity Together: How Citizen Science Drives Europe’s Legume Future

At a Glance

  • Citizen science experiment testing a novel, decentralised approach to conserving, managing and characterising legume genetic resources - awarded the 2024 EU Prize for Citizen Science

  • Creation of intelligent collections and innovative conservation strategies through participatory citizen science

  • Improved management and sharing of legume genetic resources, focusing on common bean, lentil, chickpea and lupin

The conservation and valorisation of food legume genetic resources and their utilisation in European agriculture are key to developing more sustainable farming systems and healthier food products.

Focusing on chickpea, common bean, lentil and lupin, the award-winning project INCREASE implements a new approach to conserve, manage and characterise genetic resources: placing citizen science at its core. Through a large-scale participatory experiment, citizens across Europe actively contribute to the conservation, multiplication and sharing of seeds, fostering agricultural biodiversity. The project also promises to attract additional private and public investment to boost food legume breeding.

Furthermore, the availability of and access to well-described and well-managed collections of genetic resources, capturing the full range of species diversity, are crucial to achieving a competitive level of agronomic performance and sustainability in the EU.

Preserving Legume Agrobiodiversity

Preserving Legume Agrobiodiversity

Biodiversity and agrobiodiversity are at great risk. The change of our climate is one main factor in losing the unique diversity of life on our planet. And so, the diversity in crops is in steady decline.

At the same time, human plant protein intake is on the rise in many EU regions and the market for meat and dairy alternatives is undergoing annual growth rates of 14% and 11% respectively. To face the increasing demand for innovative products and comply with the citizens’ demands for healthy and environmentally friendly food, novel varieties are needed and existing genetic resources in crop breeding must be properly exploited. However, especially in the field of food legumes, breeding investment and research have been modest, leading to a largely unexplored genetic potential of these important staple food crops.

Cutting-edge Approaches for Agrobiodiversity Preservation

Cutting-edge Approaches for Agrobiodiversity Preservation

Focusing on chickpea, common bean, lentil and lupin, INCREASE develops, tests and implements a new approach to conserve, manage and characterise genetic resources through participatory research to foster agricultural biodiversity in Europe.

INCREASE combines cutting-edge approaches in plant genetics and genomics, high throughput phenotyping, including molecular phenotyping (e.g. transcriptomics and metabolomics), with most recent advances in information technology and artificial intelligence to boost the conservation of European crop genetic resources and promote their use and valorisation.

At the heart of INCREASE lies a Citizen Science Experiment: citizens across Europe contribute to and test an innovative decentralised approach to seed conservation, multiplication and sharing to conserve agrobiodiversity.

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Tamara Messer
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