Talk:Germplasm sampling

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Discussion for: Germplasm sampling • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Germplasm sampling covers how a collector decides how many plants, which plants, how much seed from each and how many populations to take when gathering germplasm, how large the result needs to be, how much seed can be taken without harm to the source population, and what is recorded of this for cannabis. The fieldwork of a collecting mission belongs to Germplasm collecting. Choosing a subset from a collection already held belongs to Core collection. Storage and regrowing belong to Ex situ conservation and Gene bank. The theory of effective size, and the numbers grown at each regrowing of a stored cannabis accession, belong to Effective population size.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources

• Food and Agriculture Organization (2014), Genebank Standards for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, pp. 10 and 18–22: the minimum sample, the allele target, the collecting form, depletion of the source population.
• Crossa and Vencovsky (2011) and Parra-Quijano, Iriondo and Torres Lamas (2011), chapters 5 and 6 of Collecting Plant Genetic Diversity: Technical Guidelines. 2011 Update (Bioversity International): probability models, effective size of a seed sample, mother plants and sites, dioecious species, collecting of wild relatives.
• Hoban, Kallow and Trivedi (2018), Biological Conservation 225: 10–21; Hoban and colleagues (2020), Proceedings of the Royal Society B 287: 20200102; Koontz, Salas and Hoban, Conservation Genetics 27: 3: tests of the rules against genetic data and simulations.
• Center for Plant Conservation, "Collecting seeds from wild rare plant populations": the 10 per cent limit and the work of Menges and colleagues (2004) behind it.
• Aina and colleagues (2025), Scientific Reports 15: 20423; Ford and colleagues (2024), Ecology and Evolution 14: e11325; Welling and colleagues (2016); Lemeshev, Rumyantseva and Clarke (1995): cannabis.

Marshall and Brown

The allele target of Marshall and Brown (1975) and the figures of 30 and 60 plants are given as the 2014 FAO standards state them, citing Marshall and Brown (1975) and Brown and Hardner (2000). The 1995 chapter by Brown and Marshall in the first edition of the collecting guidelines, which the 2011 chapter by Crossa and Vencovsky updates, is not cited directly. The figures of 160 to 250 and 533 to 1,708 plants are Crossa and Vencovsky's summary of the models of Crossa and colleagues (1993).

Scope of the rules

The probability models assume random sampling and independent loci and leave out the structure of the population. Hoban and colleagues (2020) worked on 11 long-lived woody species kept as living plants, and Hoban, Kallow and Trivedi (2018) on one tree. The limits of the Center for Plant Conservation are written for rare wild plants in the United States; the 20 per cent ceiling of the European Native Seed Conservation Network is the one the FAO standards cite. None of these sources applies its numbers to cannabis.

Numbers in Aina and colleagues

The methods give 1,815 female plants from 88 populations collected by the team in 2022 and 2023, plus one population from the Geneva collection and two from Colorado State University. The results give 1,821 plants from 91 populations; 91 is the team's 88 with the three added. The article uses the methods' figures for the team's own collecting.

Date of Koontz, Salas and Hoban

The article appeared online on 13 November 2025 in volume 27 of Conservation Genetics, the issue of February 2026. It is cited by the issue year.