Talk:In situ conservation

Talk

Discussion for: In situ conservation • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

In situ conservation covers keeping populations where they grow: the definition and method, the case from continued selection, protected areas and reserves, farmers who keep landraces, wild and feral stands, the drug treaties as they bear on growing the plant, and what the sources do not establish for cannabis. Storage in gene banks belongs to Ex situ conservation. What germplasm is belongs to Germplasm. Definitions of a landrace belong to Landrace Cannabis. The methods of reserves and of farm projects belong to Genetic reserve and On-farm conservation. Campaigns against the plant belong to Eradication.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Sources

• Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), articles 2 and 8; International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (2001), article 5.
• Maxted, Ford-Lloyd and Hawkes (eds) (1997), Plant Genetic Conservation: The In Situ Approach; Maxted, Magos Brehm and Kell (2013), Resource Book for the Preparation of National Plans for Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives and Landraces; Bellon and colleagues (2017), Evolutionary Applications 10: 965–977: the general frame.
• McPartland and Small (2020), PhytoKeys 144: 81–112; Clarke and Merlin (2016), Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences 35: 293–327; Welling and colleagues (2016), Frontiers in Plant Science 7: 1113; Chouvy (2024), International Journal of Drug Policy 129: 104479; Clarke (1995), Journal of the International Hemp Association 2: 57, 60–65: cannabis landraces and wild relatives.
• Aina and colleagues (2025), Scientific Reports 15: 20423; Ford and colleagues (2024), Ecology and Evolution 14: e11325; Canavan and colleagues (2022), Biological Conservation 274: 109709; Balant and colleagues (2025), Plants, People, Planet 7: 1771–1788; Grigoryev and Illarionova (2020), Сельскохозяйственная биология 55: 107–117: wild and feral stands.
• The nomination file and the management plan of the Great Himalayan National Park; the press and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for Yala, Tsaratanana, Virunga, Issyk-Kul and the Moroccan licences.

Whether a programme for cannabis exists

None of the works named above describes a reserve or an on-farm project set up to conserve cannabis. Bellon and colleagues draw their cases from wheat, maize, pearl millet, potato, rice, barley, sorghum and cassava, among others. Maxted, Magos Brehm and Kell mention Cannabis once, in a list of European crop databases. Welling and colleagues write on stored collections. This is a statement about these works. It does not show that no village, cooperative or group keeps a population with conservation as its aim.

A plant growing in a protected area is not thereby conserved. In the terms of Maxted, Magos Brehm and Kell, a taxon in a protected area with no plan for it is passively conserved. The park and police reports on the article go further than that: they describe its removal.

The 1997 definitions

The working definitions of the 1997 volume are quoted in the 2013 resource book and cited there to the volume. The wording on the page follows the 2013 text.

The Moroccan licences

L'Opinion's report of 11 March 2024, republished by Morocco's agricultural research institute, rests on the word of the cooperative's president and notes that the agency had not yet confirmed the news. TelQuel's report of August 2024, written with the state news agency, gives the seed and cooperative figures. The president's account of a selection trial to improve the variety describes a change to the population. The name Beldia is the reports' word.

Whether licensed growing on this scale helps or harms the local population is not settled by these reports. Neither measures any effect.

McPartland and Small on seed banks

McPartland and Small write that "Collection and conservation of germplasm of indigenous populations of Central and South Asian landraces in their centers of diversity is urgently needed". That sentence could be read as asking for conservation in the field or for collecting there. Their next sentences rank in situ conservation as preferable in general and seed banks as the immediate priority for cannabis, which is how the article reads it.

Clarke and Merlin on loss

Clarke and Merlin's statements that most landraces are no longer grown, and that the "vast majority" may already be extinct, are their judgement, and they give no count. The article attributes them.

Feral stands

Aina and colleagues and Ford and colleagues treat feral hemp as a genetic resource to be collected. Canavan and colleagues treat it as a weed and possible invader. The two views concern overlapping populations in the American Midwest and are set side by side.

Bambuti growers in Virunga

National Geographic's report of 2017 says that the plants grow wild in the forest. That is the growers' account, with no botanical check behind it.