Schriften zu Genetischen Ressourcen - Genres

Mansfeld's Encyclopedia of Agricultural and Horticultural Crops and the Mansfeld phenomenon
but it is also grown for fodder and as a vegetable and has an enormous potential as a
fertilizer, for wastewater treatment and for the production of chemicals, fibres, biogas,
etc.
The treatment of new alternative plant crops can even touch such remote questions
as the conservation of whales. Simmondsia chinensis (Link) C.K. Schneider became
very popular in arid land use in the 80s of the last century in southern U.S.A., parts of
the Mediterranean, and Australia. Its valuable liquid wax is used as a substitute for
sperm whale oil in the chemical industry. Today everybody knows jojoba oil, at least
as an ingredient of various cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
During the countdown to the second German edition you could often meet three or
four authors at the same time in the small room of the Department’s reference library.
All of them were busy looking for essential information regarding the taxa they were
working on, but discussed briefly new findings or nomenclatural difficulties. One of
them, Claus Tittel, demonstrated how to work according to Prof. Mansfeld’s
parsimony principle using very small pencils with prolongation and brown packing
paper for writing his notes. I myself struggled to find my way when answering the
following main questions: What literature is available at Gatersleben, what
information may I find and accept from which source, and where I can find reference
texts such as the “ING Book” (Index Nominum Genericorum), “Wealth of India”,
“Kul’turnaja Flora”, “Englers Pflanzenreich”, “Economic Botany” or “Flora Malesiana”?
The growth of the stock of references related to plant genetic resources (PGR)
available in the Scientific Library at Gatersleben is shown in Figure 3. The library has
been a principle source of information for all editions of Mansfeld’s Encyclopedia.
Despite many new sources of online information, the need to have hard copies of a
wide range of relevant literature in Gatersleben, both for germplasm-taxonomy and
for encyclopedic work, is today as urgent and essential as it has always been. For
substantial support of the library during the last ten years we are grateful to the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
Striking the balance of all editions of our encyclopaedia (Figure 1) we have to
understand that many of the authors worked in the tradition of Rudolf Mansfeld. They
identified personally with this book, and sometimes it became a matter close to their
hearts: Dr. Hanelt spent five years of his retirement as an author and editor of the 3 rd
edition (= 1 st English ed.).
At a Mansfeld-party with IPK’s director Prof. U. Wobus in 2001 we encountered Dr.
R. Büttner from the Fruit Genebank at Dresden-Pillnitz, but only in the afternoon:
“No”, he said, “I came already in the morning, using this opportunity to visit the
library. I’m already preparing for the 4 th edition!”
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