Animal genetic resources diversity and ecosystem services

Animal Genetic Resources (AnGR) are a component of agricultural biodiversity making a large contribution to ecosystem services, resulting from their complex interaction with their respective environments. This review investigates how AnGR diversity, which includes more than 7000 distinct local and 1000 transboundary livestock breeds of around 40 species plus domesticated honeybees and other pollinators, influences, through livestock production systems and practices, the generation of a diversity of provisioning, regulating and maintenance, as well as cultural ecosystem services. The main use of domestic animals is for their provisional services of food production, with a large contribution from commercial breeds in industrial production systems in developed and emerging countries. However, in rural areas of developing countries, local livestock breeds often play a crucial role in food security, nutrition and health. Less intensive systems, located especially in harsh climate conditions, offer more diverse ecosystem services, including important regulating and maintenance services, with indirect use or non-use values, while permitting the use of land not suitable for crop production. Breeds used in such systems have often developed specific adaptive features for those environments. The identification and integration of traits relevant for ecosystem services within breeding programmes represent however a particular challenge, especially in low-input systems. The keepers of the livestock that offer these services are often marginalised and isolated from markets and excluded from decision making processes, however. It is therefore important to recognize the existence and value of these ecosystem services to better understand the trade-offs and synergies associated with their maintenance, and to account for them in policy and legal frameworks at national and international levels including providing appropriate incentives to the communities contributing to the generation of those services.