The main goal of this Project is to stablish and to maintain a ‘bank’ to preserve the genetic diversity of wild population of the genus ULMUS in Atlantic Area, throughout the maintenance of several elm trees specimen cultures, which are at risk of extinction. This line of action guarantees the long-term conservation of possible important alleles in order to recover different elm trees once that it is controlled grafiosis disease and Climate Change.
Currently, the maintenance of genetic conservation parcel suffers important management problems, because of these parcels are affected by grafiosis. For these reasons, this project aimed at ensuring the genetic diversity of Atlantic Area elm trees populations in isolated territories, which are free from grafiosis disease (Macaronesia Islands).