By christelle.rabil@croptrust.org
7 February 2023

Did you know that you can search for accessions by climatic variables? This guide explains how this works in Genesys.

Dr. Alan Humphries, curator at the Australian Pastures Genebank, compiled a comprehensive video guide on searching by climate in Genesys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NM0z5Zl_cA

Genesys makes it possible to search across more than 4 million accessions maintained in over 500 genebanks worldwide. Of those, over 1 million are accompanied by geographical coordinates of the sites from where the material was originally collected. Such georeferenced accessions are included in the maps generated by Genesys.

Image: Map of georeferenced Trifolium spumosum generated by Genesys

If we assume that plants adapt to their environment with time, then accessions collected from warmer environments should be more tolerant to hot conditions compared to those collected from areas with cooler climates, for example.

This guide documents the different ways you can use climatic parameters to find matching accessions in Genesys.

Genesys first links the coordinates of accessions with the data about the climate at the corresponding location. The climate data is sourced from WorldClim, a global climate dataset with a spatial resolution of about 1 km2 at the equator which includes a number of bioclimatic variables useful for our purposes:

Temperature variables:

• Annual: Annual mean temperature [°C] and annual temperature range (bio5-bio6) [°C]

• Quarterly: Mean temperatures of wettest, driest, warmest, and coldest quarters [°C]

• Seasonal: Temperature seasonality (standard deviation *100)

• Monthly: Maximum temperature of warmest month [°C] and minimum temperature of coldest month [°C]

• Mean diurnal temperature range (mean of monthly (max temp - min temp))

• Isothermality 

Precipitation variables:

• Annual: Annual precipitation [mm]

• Quarterly: Precipitation of wettest, driest, warmest, and coldest quarter [mm]

• Season: Precipitation seasonality 

• Monthly: Precipitation of wettest month [mm] and of driest month [mm]

1. Select a point on the map

The simplest option is to select the climate for which you wish to find accessions by simply pointing to any land area on the map in Genesys. This will display the climate at the selected location and offer the option to list the accessions that are linked to similar temperature and precipitation conditions:

2. Choose the climate of another accession

Alternatively, for any accession that includes coordinates, Genesys will display the climatic conditions at that location and offer to find accessions that match the temperature and precipitation conditions of that location. You can get a list of these accessions by clicking this button in an accession’s details page:

3. Adjust the filters sidebar

The two options described above only use a carefully selected set of climatic filters: annual mean temperature, seasonality and rainfall. You can adjust or specify your own filters in the Climate at origin section, which is at the end of the filters sidebar, after all the taxonomy and provenance filters.

The precipitation and temperature variables, for which you can set the minimum and/or maximum values, are grouped under the Climate at origin section.

You found an accession using the climatic search, now what?

If you want to order samples of any of the accessions identified by these searches from the genebanks that conserve them, check out our step-by-step guide to requesting accessions through Genesys. 

Or you may want to download the passport data or KML file of these accessions for your own analysis. In this case you will need to log in to your Genesys account and click the Download MCPD or Download KML buttons.