For Land Managers

Genetic Resources and Adaptive Potential

Genetic diversity is nature's insurance policy. It allows increased production, assures ecological resilience and creates options for future innovative products. Natures Genetic Resources also provide us with new food varieties, pharmaceuticals and more recently, bio-energy opportunities.

Just as humans depend upon the products of agriculture, agriculture depends upon biological and ecosystem resources and processes that provide the raw materials to produce new and improved food plants, livestock, and other products. A diverse range of organisms contributes to the resilience of natural ecosystems by increasing the capacity to recover from environmental stress and adaptive ability.

Conservation and management of genetic resources within domesticated species is also important for human well being. These efforts have been improving agricultural production for thousands of years. The diversity of species provides many thousands of products through agriculture as well as from the harvest of natural populations. Many Genetic Resources such as uses for plants and animals are still unknown and await discovery. Yet these cannot be utilized and benefit humankind if they disappear before they are discovered. For example, many of our spices (cinnamon, pepper) and critical medications (aspirin, tamoxifen, quinine, and digitalis) have been discovered "accidentally" because plants or animals produced a myriad of chemicals for defense or attraction. We would not have otherwise considered the organisms from which these chemicals originated as valuable and worthy of conservation if they had not been recognized in their natural biological function.

Canada is home to about 71,500 known species of plants, wild animals and other organisms, and an estimated additional 66,000 species that are not yet discovered. Some 90% of all our current foodstuffs are derived from and crossbred with wild or natural biodiversity. Currently we principally use about 50,000 edible species of plants and animals world wide. Canada also contains 25% of the world's wetlands as well as 25% of the world's boreal forest. Both of these ecosystems are important global ecosystems because of the service they provide such as wildlife habitat, water purification service and as a "global lung" inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen.

Genetic resources can be preserved in specialized facilities, on farms or in the wild. In Canada, ex situ preservation plays a critical role in providing continued access to viable seed stocks and cell lines, that would otherwise be lost as wild populations and species and traditional crops and breeds change or become extinct.