Seeds History and Network Management System

Introduction

In 2005, a collaboration started between the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) and the farmer organization Réseau Semences Paysannes (RSP). The aim was: (1) to study on-farm management of crop diversity; (2) to develop population-varieties adapted to organic and low inputs agriculture in the context of a participatory plant breeding program involving farmers, NGOs’ facilitators and researchers. In this project, researchers needed to map the history of the population-varieties using the network formalism. In addition to the diffusion among farms, they wanted to document the other steps of life cycle of the seed lot like the reproduction, the selection, and the cross steps. Data characterizing the different seed lots were produced at each step like phenotyping and cultural practices data. All this information needed to be centralized and stored. Thus, we developed SHiNeMaS (Seeds History and Network Management System) a database with its web interface, dedicated to the management of the history of seed lots and the associated data.