Thesis subject

Documenting and mapping the origins and diversity of vegetable crops

Increasing the abundance and diversity of vegetables in diets is an important pathway to improving human nutrition and health worldwide. WUR is partnering on the development of a new major global initiative on vegetable diversity, which aims to collect a wide range of major as well as under-utilized vegetable crop varieties, and their wild related species, around the world, conserve these genetic resources in national and international agricultural genebanks, and mobilize this diversity to increase consumption of vegetables particularly in hotspots of malnutrition. To provide a scientific foundation for such a global initiative, WUR is contributing to research aimed at understanding the distributions and conservation status of vegetable crop diversity worldwide.