TRADITIONAL AGRICULTURE

The biodiversity is not solely a consequence of the interaction between biotic and abiotics factors in the context of natural selection. The artificial selection has played an important role in the origin of numerous species or varieties of plants or animals, with traditional or economic importance. Man has been able to handle natural processes so that, selecting genotypes of many organisms that were favourable to him, he has been originating plants and domestic animals. These ones have been chosen among the wild species and have been object of a particular care in their cultivation or breeding, developing, with the pass of the time, varieties or local breeds specially adapted to their environment or wished effort, constituting an authentic genes bank, which makes them important from the point of view of the biodiversity conservation.

These resources are a source of genetic variability and characters impossible to recover if they are lost. This fact, important by itself, is added to the economic and social interest of these varieties or breeds, because they are directly used as human food or raw material for the agro-alimentary industry, as well as forest, industrial, medicinal, ornamental or recreational aims.