Landrace.Wiki:Mission-Statement

Landrace.Wiki exists to document and conserve the world's traditional cannabis varieties before they are lost.

Cannabis landraces are varieties shaped over centuries by natural selection, local climates, and the deliberate choices of traditional farmers. They represent an irreplaceable genetic and cultural heritage: the living record of cannabis evolution, encoding adaptations to specific environments and the accumulated knowledge of generations of cultivators. Once lost, they cannot be reconstructed.

They are being lost now, faster than they are being documented.

The Crisis

Prohibition enforcement, agricultural modernisation, and climate change are converging to drive a mass extinction of cannabis genetic diversity. It is largely invisible to the public and almost entirely undocumented by formal institutions.

Eradication campaigns are the most immediate threat. Governments destroy cultivated populations wholesale, often the only remaining reservoirs of locally adapted genetics. Each operation eliminates plants and the traditional knowledge systems maintained by the farming communities that grow them. Our Current Events feed tracks these campaigns as they happen, building the first systematic record of what is being destroyed and where.

Genetic introgression is slower and quieter. As commercial hybrid varieties spread into traditional growing regions through seed distribution, market pressure, or simple curiosity, they cross with local landraces and dilute the genetic distinctiveness that makes those populations valuable. A landrace does not need to be eradicated to be lost. It only needs to be hybridised beyond recognition.

Generational knowledge loss compounds both threats. The farmers who maintain traditional varieties, who know which plants to select and which to cull, who understand the local growing calendar and the characteristics their community values: these knowledge holders are ageing. When they stop cultivating, or when their children choose different livelihoods, the oral tradition that sustains a landrace population disappears even if the seeds survive in a jar.

No institution is systematically documenting what remains. Cannabis falls outside the mandate of conventional agricultural gene banks due to its legal status. Academic research is constrained by prohibition. The communities most affected have the least capacity to document their own heritage. The documentation gap grows wider every year.

Our Commitments

Open access

All documentation on Landrace.Wiki is freely accessible. Conservation knowledge must not be locked behind paywalls or institutional access requirements. If a variety is endangered, the people working to preserve it should be able to find the information they need, wherever they are and whatever their resources.

Primary source rigour

We prioritise direct documentation over compilation. Accessions are verified at the point of origin. Historical claims are traced to primary sources (colonial archives, ethnobotanical fieldwork, government records) rather than recycled from secondary accounts. Where we rely on community knowledge or unverified reports, we say so explicitly. The distinction between documented and known is fundamental to this project's credibility: we will not claim to have verified what we have not.

Farmer safety

The communities that maintain traditional cannabis varieties do so, in most cases, in defiance of the law. Documentation that enables conservation must not simultaneously enable enforcement. GPS coordinates for collection sites are obscured by ±500m. Farmer identities are protected through aliases or omission. We will not publish information that puts our sources at risk.

Transparent methodology

Every factual claim on this platform is referenced. Our documentation tiers (Tier 1 through Tier 3) make explicit what level of verification each accession has received. Our geographic hierarchy, from Gene Pool down to individual Accession, provides a standardised framework that enables comparison and prevents the vague provenance claims common in commercial cannabis marketing. If we do not know something, we say so. If our assessment is provisional, we mark it as such.

Collaborative authority

Landrace.Wiki is not a closed database maintained by a single organisation. It is a wiki, designed for community contribution, peer review, and iterative improvement. The Zomia Collective provides core field documentation, editorial standards, and technical infrastructure, but the platform's long-term value depends on contributions from researchers, growers, preservationists, and traditional knowledge holders worldwide. No single group has the geographic reach or linguistic capacity to document global cannabis diversity alone.

What We Are Building

In the near term, Landrace.Wiki is a reference platform: accession data, country histories, conservation status assessments, and a real-time feed of enforcement and policy developments affecting landrace populations.

Over time, it is intended to become the evidentiary foundation for cannabis conservation. A citable, structured, publicly accessible body of documentation that can support:

• Conservation prioritisation – Identifying which populations are most threatened and where resources should be directed
• Legal and policy advocacy – Providing documented evidence that traditional cannabis cultivation has cultural, agricultural, and genetic value worth protecting
• Academic research – Offering structured, queryable data with clear provenance and citation standards that researchers can build on
• Community empowerment – Giving farming communities and local preservationists access to documentation about their own heritage, and a platform to contribute their knowledge on their own terms

This is not a seed catalogue. It is not a strain review site. It is an attempt to build, collaboratively and in the open, the record that should exist of one of humanity's oldest cultivated plants, before that record is no longer possible to compile.

Get Involved

• Document an accession – Add varieties to the database
• Contribute to existing pages – Improve, correct, and expand what is already here
• Community portal – Stay connected with project developments
• Contact the Zomia Collective – For partnership enquiries, field collaboration, or institutional support