International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture


The tools developed under the framework of the programme CAPFITOGEN represent an effort to bring some scientific and technological advances to the technical community working at the national entities on conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources. Each tool is designed to make efficient and easy certain tasks that until now were more complex and required expert knowledge of computer programming languages such as ​​Java and R. The tools are designed to help in decision-making in countries with many plant genetic resources to conserve and limited economic resources for this work. The tools are available in English, Spanish and Portuguese and they are described in a manual.

The tools improve, adapt and facilitate the use of methodologies for ecogeography and geographic information systems, and significantly reduce the time and effort for their adoption while maintaining its original scientific validity. This is achieved thanks to the involvement of the same research group that produces the scientific advancement in the design of each tool.

Through different training and capacity building strategies such as face-to-face workshops and online support, CAPFITOGEN tools reaches end users like the technical staff of the national programs and other institutions involved in the conservation of these valuable resources.


Since 2012 the Programme has developed a series of tools with emphasis on the ex situ conservation. They are all based on ecogeography and geographic information systems (GIS) for the conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources

GEOQUAL: It assesses the quality of the passport data that describes the location and the coordinates indicated as a collection site.

ELC Mapas: It provides information on various different environmental scenarios in order to assess plant adaptation processes in a given territory and to improve agrobiodiversity conservation and the sustainable use.

Representa: It allows users to analyze eco-geographical representativeness of a species within a germplasm collection.

ECOGEO: It allows ecogeographical germplasm characterization by analyzing over a hundred variables.

DIV mapas: It generates maps with areas of high ecogeographical, phenotypical and/or genotypic variability, based on the determination of ecogeographic, phenotypic or genotypic distance.

ColNucleo: It facilitates ecogeographical germplasm characterization by analysing over a hundred variables.

FIGS_R: It applies filters to facilitate the selection of appropriate germplasm according to specific interests of crop breeders like particular resistances or tolerance to given biotic or abiotic stresses.

Testable: It checks if the passport and input tables are properly set up and detects several type of errors. It offers the option to make automatic corrections.

Complementa: To obtain coverage and complementarity analysis by cell or protected areas networks for a given territory. It is also useful to determine the best cells where to focus collecting efforts for multi-crop (or multi-species) expeditions.

Modela: Designed to obtain up to 11 different Species Distribution Models (SDM), evaluate them and (optionally) assemble the best rated. Modela can work with bioclimatic data for current and future conditions, producing results for both at the same time.

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