Abstract

Plant genetic resources have used since man first cultivated plants, but their importance was not realized until Vavilov (1926) discovered wide variation among plants of the same species. It is about 40 years since Vavilov and his collaborators in Russia and described origin centers (geographical centers) of our cultivated crops and their wild relatives by Institute of Vavilov (namely right now). Later with expansion of breeding programs, breeder realized that success was largely dependent upon the availability of wide genetic diversity. Turkey is located in the Eastern Mediterranean and bridge between Europe and Asia in the northern hemisphere and located in subtropics zone in between 36-42° latitudes N and 26-45° longitude E. The area is 783.562 km2. The total amount of arable land and land under permanent about 23 million hectares. The topography of Turkey exhibits significant variety where ecological factors chance greatly over very short distance.

Turkish flora includes many wild relatives of important cultivated plants (e.g. wheat, barley, chickpea, lentil, oil plants, forage legume, some fruits such as cherry, apricot, chestnut, pistachio etc.) as well. The Turkish flora also includes many economically important timber species, and medicinal, aromatic, industrial and ornamental plants.

There are five more or less distinct kinds of germplasm material which are involved: (1) cultivars in current use, (2) obsolete cultivars, (3) special genetic stocks, such as resistance stocks, genetic and cytogenetic material, induced mutations etc., (4) primitive varieties or land races, and (5) wild and weed species related to cultivated species.