Status of medicinal and aromatic plants in - Inia

6
WORKING GROUP ON MEDICINAL AND AROMATIC PLANTS: FIRST MEETING
Country reports
Before the meeting, all Working Group members had been requested to prepare a country
report covering the following topics:
- legal protection of MAP species and their natural habitats;
- ex situ conservation;
- existence of MAP inventory activities at national level, and if so, type of data recorded;
- review of the acreage of MAPs under cultivation;
- availability of information regarding the use of MAPs by processing industries
(respective amounts of material of cultivated origin and of raw materials gathered in the
wild);
- experiences in sustainable use of MAPs.
The following reports were presented at the meeting by the respective country
representatives: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Lithuania,
Macedonia F.Y.R., Nordic countries, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Turkey, United Kingdom
and F.R. Yugoslavia.
Non-attending members (representatives from the Czech Republic, Malta and Portugal)
provided contributions for publication in the proceedings.
All full papers available are included in Part II (see pages 25-142).
Documentation and databases
The European Internet Search Catalogue, EURISCO and the EPGRIS project
On behalf of IPGRI, Elinor Lipman presented the EPGRIS project for the Establishment of a
Plant Genetic Resources Infra-Structure. This 3-year project (2000-2003) was developed
within the ECP/GR Documentation and Information Network and was approved for
funding within the Fifth Framework Programme of the European Union. The objective is to
establish a European Internet Search Catalogue (EURISCO) with passport information of
plant genetic resources maintained ex situ in Europe. The catalogue will be frequently
updated and publicly accessible via Internet. Initial data sets will be derived from the
European Central Crop Databases (ECCDBs); however the project will promote the creation
of national inventories, which are planned to become the main source of data. PGR National
Coordinators of the large majority of European countries have nominated national inventory
focal persons. These people will be invited to attend three subregional meetings, to discuss
coordination and standardization of the data flow from the national inventories to the central
catalogue. The project partners will also provide technical support to the focal persons and a
limited number of training visits to the main European documentation support centres will
be arranged. EURISCO is seen as an important European contribution to the Clearing House
Mechanism (CHM) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the implementation
of the Global Plan of Action (GPA). A Web-based interface will allow easy searching of the
European national inventories, in the same way as it is possible today to use SINGER
(System-wide Information Network for Genetic Resources) to search the CGIAR collections
and GRIN (Germplasm Resources Information System) to search the USDA collections. The
catalogue will carry an important minimum set of passport data, frequently and
automatically updated from the national inventories. These data are based on the revised
version of the FAO/IPGRI Multi-crop passport descriptor list (MCPD), finalized in December
2001. The full list is available on-line at http://www.ecpgr.cgiar.org/Databases/Databases.htm.
The project has implications for the central databases that are often the main product of
collaboration within the ECP/GR Working Groups. The idea will be to take the workload of
collecting the passport data away from the central crop database managers, since these data
will become directly accessible from the EURISCO catalogue. On the other hand, ECCDB