Ahmed Amri, Mohamed Nawar, Abdallah Nari, Ali Shehadeh, Bilal Humeid
International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), Aleppo, Syria

Genetic resources are needed as parental germplasm for breeding and as sources material for rehabilitation of degraded ecosystems to overcome major biotic and abiotic challenges affecting food security and agricultural development. Both ex situ and in situ conservation approaches should be used, in a complementary manner, to safeguard the remaining diversity.
The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) plays a crucial role in conserving genetic resources of wheat, food and fee legumes, temperate range and forests and Rhizobium strains. Its genebank in Syria holds more than 142,000 accessions most of which are landraces, wild relatives and native species collected from four major centers of diversity, and around 1400 strains of food legume Rhizobium. On average, 20,000 samples are distributed annually to collaborators inside and outside ICARDA for their use in breeding, research and education. ICARDA is also fully involved in promoting in situ/on-farm conservation of non-tropical dryland agrobiodiversity and in developing the related scientific basis.
ICARDA applies new approaches for enriching the genebank holding with novel diversity and for targeting accessions with sought traits. Gap analysis is used to determine areas for future collecting to cover the geographic distribution of targeted species and it is combined with stress layers to target accessions with adaptive traits during the collecting missions such as salt, heat and drought tolerance. More than 3600 new accessions were collected using these approaches in the past three years.
For effective use of stored genetic resources, the Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS) is used to select best-bet subsets four various adaptive traits using appropriate algorithms describing the relationships between environmental conditions and the sought-after traits.  More than 23 subsets are already supplied to partners which led to identification of novel sources of resistance for powdery mildew, Hessian fly, Sunn pest, Russian wheat aphid in case of wheat.
ICARDA is joining efforts with national programs to assess the status and trends of agrobiodiversity ant its threats and to recommend technological, socio-economic, institutional and policy options for in situ conservation of remaining biodiversity hotspots.