The scientific community of Montpellier has a long tradition of conservation, research and training on the genetic diversity of Mediterranean and tropical crops.
ARCAD (Agropolis Resource Centre for Crop Conservation, Adaptation and Diversity) was born from the ambition of this community to gather its forces and to acquire new means to better fulfill its missions of preservation and promotion of crop diversity for sustainable agriculture, based on the development and sharing of knowledge.
ARCAD is an open and innovative platform of biological, technological, methodological, cognitive and educational resources.
Its physical heart is the new ARCAD building which will be inaugurated on October 6. This building houses the GAMèt Biological Resource Center, which is in charge of Montpellier's main collections of Mediterranean and tropical plant seeds, as well as technological platforms for cryopreservation, phenotypic characterization of seeds and molecular analysis. It also hosts research teams and visiting students and scientists.
Beyond the walls of the building, ARCAD is also a center for the convergence and exchange of research, expertise, and experience in order to understand how the diversity of cultivated plants has been and is shaped by the physical and biological environment and by human societies. This knowledge and data will be used for the management and mobilization of crop diversity and thus respond to the challenges of the major transitions underway and to come: agro-ecological, climatic and societal transitions.
The ARCAD platform is a multi-institutional initiative supported by research units in Montpellier working in the field of agrobiodiversity and plant improvement.Because the time is no longer for research alone to provide answers, ARCAD is intended to open up to benefit the diversity of academic research and teaching partners as well as economic and citizen partners in plant agrobiodiversity, in the Occitanie region, and also at the national, European and international levels, particularly in the South.
As a high-level technological infrastructure and a platform for knowledge development and sharing, ARCAD will host and stimulate synergies between conservation, research and training, between biological and social science disciplines and between agrobiodiversity stakeholders.
Read more: https://www.arcad-project.org/about-arcad
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