In Situ Conservation of Kazakhstan’s Mountain Agrobiodiversity Kazakhstan

The famous Russian academician and geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943), identified Central Asia as one of eight global centres of origin for cultivated plants. Kazakhstan has since become renowned for being the global centre of wild apple diversity, as reflected in the name of its largest city, Almaty, meaning ‘place of apples’. It also harbours the genetic base for numerous other traditional fruit crops, such as apricots, gooseberry, grape, currant and buckthorn. To address the dramatic loss of wild fruit forests in that region, the “In situ conservation of Kazakhstan’s Mountain Agrobiodiversity” UNDP-GEF project was implemented in 2006. Some of the notables achievements include: The establishment of Dzhungar Alatau National Park (356,022 ha), the first of its kind in Kazakhstan that focuses primarily on conserving mountain agrobiodiversity; completed full inventory of wild fruit forests in the Project sites, along with DNA analyses of samples of genetic material, to identify clusters of pure genotype as well as hotspots of cultivated ingressions; and the establishment of the first field gene bank in the Ile Alatau National Park to conserve the genetic diversity of wild apple and wild apricot, following FHC Ordinance of October 2011.