Download PDF (6215 kb) - Bioversity International

The European Poa Database 14
EUROPEAN CENTRAL FORAGES DATABASES 33
Manager: Evelin Willner
IPK-Genebank, Aussenstelle Malchow, Malchow/Poel, Germany
URL: http://www.dainet.de/genres/eccdb/poa/poa.htm
In the European Catalogue of Poa, 12 institutes from nine countries with a total of 2636
accessions are listed (Table 1), as a result of the recent updating of the European Poa
Database. Letters requesting Poa passport data were sent to 26 institutions in 19 countries
holding relevant germplasm.
Until 1995, the European Poa database was maintained by Dr L. Seidewitz at BGRC
Braunschweig. In connection with his retirement, and according to a decision of the
ECP/GR Forages Working Group in 1995, the responsibility for maintaining and updating
the Poa database was transferred to the Genebank for Oil and Forage Crops in
Malchow/Poel, which is part of IPK's genebank. Dr Seidewitz sent a copy of the database
and some updates which he had received but not yet incorporated, to Malchow in 1995. The
former Poa Database arrived in a text format, where fields were delimited by '$ '.
Data from institutions which had sent updates later were excluded from the 1995
database. The remaining data (belonging to institutions from which no updates were
received) were retained and transformed into the new structure.
Other data received from contributing institutions (updates and/or new contributors)
arrived in different formats, mainly .dbf (dBase or FoxPro), .xls (Excel) or ASCII files of
various structures. They were transformed into a unique format, which was developed
based on earlier recommendations of the ECP/GR Forages Working Group (Guide to
ECP/GR Forages Databases; 1991) and the IPGRI Multicrop Passport Descriptors (Draft of
January 1997). The actual descriptors included in the new Poa database were chosen
according to the descriptors present in the data files of contributors. Some of the original
fields were put together into one resulting field, for example, different fields describing
different aspects of the habitat of the collecting site. Information which could not easily be
assigned to any field from the proposed structure was put into a 'Remarks' field.
No attempt was made to standardize names of institutions which appear mainly in the
fields 'Donor', 'Breeding Institute' or 'Collecting Institute'. The variety of formats and the
level of detail of this kind of information in the original data files was so big that it seemed
impossible to standardize such acronyms in the time available. A new version of the FAO
list of institute acronyms (author: J. Serwinski) was not yet available. In addition, often the
information about such institutions is incomplete (e.g. only the name of a person, or the
town, without further details), and such incomplete data cannot be linked to any existing list
of addresses. Often even the institute providing such data will not be able to give more
complete information.
Neither was it possible to standardize the scientific names. Only the spelling of scientific
names was standardized, and authors were added in cases where the same name appeared
with and without author in the database. In cases where the name appeared only without
author, no attempt was made to identify the author. This could be done later. The
accessions included in the database belong to 27 different species, the most frequent being
Poa pratensis with 2376 accessions, followed by P. bulbosa (68) and P. nemoralis (35).
14 Report by H. Knüpffer (IPK-Genebank, Gatersleben), S. Harrer (ZADI/IGR, Bonn), and E. Willner.