Biodiversity conservation: building skills for Palestine

August 15, 2011 at 6:15 am | Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Training on genebank management: research staff from Palestine and Jordan, resource persons from ICARDA

Palestine recently established the nucleus of a national genebank, with support from two collaborative projects with ICARDA, funded by the Netherlands government and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development. As part of this effort, ICARDA genebank specialists conducted a training course on ‘Genetic resources conservation and data management’ for Palestinian genebank staff. The course was held during 17-21 July in Amman, Jordan.

The course – conducted by Mr Bilal Humeid and Mr Jan Konopka from ICARDA – used a mixture of classroom lectures and hands-on sessions to build skills in germplasm collection strategies, documentation methods, genebank data management, viability testing, and the use of plant genetic resources databases. The training included a visit to Jordan’s national genebank and the National Center for Agricultural Research and Extension to learn from Jordan’s experiences.