Description
Evolutionary Plant Breeding (EPB) is a practice that allows consideration of an even wider genetic base, which favors i ncreasing the rate of evolution of the crop population, promoting use and conservation of crop diversity and developing dynamic population to cope with change. Evolutionary Populations (EP) of crops can adapt to climate change and heterogeneous agro- ecological environments, increasing farmers’ resilience and enhancing on farm biodiversity (Petitti et al., 2018). EPB create and maintain high degree poly morpho typic populations for accelerating development of climate resilient and sustainably high-performance varieties (Ceccarelli, 2009). Evolutionary populations (EPs) of maize, barley, bread wheat, durum wheat, common bean, tomato and summer squash are currently grown in Jordan, Ethiopia, Iran, and Italy (Ceccarelli, 2017). EPB can also be applied where there is a lack of crop breeding programs, specifically in addressing the needs of organic l ow input agriculture, high stress environments, and limited access to i nstituti onal support.
