Identification of potential areas of agricultural heritage system: Take the traditional jujube germplasm resources as an example

Abstract

[Objective] In 2002, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) launched the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) initiative, which aims to protect germplasm resources, knowledge, technology, and eco-wisdom contained. While positive progress has been made over the past 20 years, there has been a lack of clarity regarding the underlying resources of agricultural heritage system (AHS). The purpose of this study was to explore the methods for identifying potential areas of AHS with a model, and to provide data support for further study on AHS. [Methods] In this study, the maximum entropy model was used to identify potential areas of AHS from the perspective of traditional germplasm resources. Taking Chinese jujube as an example, through parameter setting and model screening, the study area was divided into four potential classes, and the first potential distribution map of jujube-AHS in China was developed. We used the coordinates of the 135 sample points of traditional jujube germplasm resources, and collected a total of 67 environmental variables for three types of resource endowments. We also input the coordinates of the seven existing jujube-GIAHS and jujube-NIAHS in China into the model for reliability test. [Results] The study chose the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve method to evaluate the accuracy of the Maxent model simulation, and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) of the model is 0.978 for the training set and 0.981 for the test set, indicating that the prediction is very satisfactory. The results show that the potential areas of jujube-AHS are mainly concentrated in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan, and Shandong Provinces are the regions with more concentrated distribution of high potential and medium potential areas, among which Hebei Province has the largest high potential area in China. Linyi County, Yanhu County, Xian County, and Wei County are among the 20 high-potential counties for the construction of jujube-AHS, and are the focus areas for the next step exploration and conservation. [Conclusion] The methodology proposed in this study helps to identify the background resources of China’s agricultural heritage system at the national level and lay the foundation for its further exploration, protection, and use. It also can be adopted for the identification of other germplasm resource types of agricultural heritage systems to preserve the traditional agricultural systems.

Keywords

• |agricultural heritage system|potential areas identification|maximum entropy model|jujube|germplasm resources|china