Third Jack R. Harlan International Symposium

Montpellier will have the honor of hosting the Third Jack R Harlan International Symposium on the Origins of Agriculture and Domestication, evolution and utilization of genetic resources. 

Call for abstracts (closed on May, 15)

About The Harlan Symposium

The Harlan Symposium was created by the University of California (UC Davis, USA) as a tribute to Jack R. Harlan, who was an American botanist and agronomist (1917-1998). J.R. Harlan was a pioneer in the study of origin agriculture and crops, showing the importance of the relationship between the activity from human development and the evolution of agricultural biodiversity. His most famous book "Crops and Man", 1975, remains a reference and has been the bedside book of generations students in plant breeding, especially in France, where J.R. Harlan’s influence was very strong in the scientific community dealing with plant genetic resources. 

On invitation of the UC Davis, the Montpellier scientific community has applied in 2016 for the third edition of the Harlan Symposium, a prestigious, recurrent but rare event, organized in 1997 and 2008. This application was selected after a competitive process. The originality of the Harlan symposium lies in the multidisciplinary aspects of the science (from archeology to genetics and agroecology), the variety of biological models (plants, animals, microorganisms) and the broad temporal scale (from the origin of agriculture to the current problems of use of agricultural biodiversity). The Third Harlan Symposium will be influenced by the research thematics of the South countries, given the Mediterranean and tropical orientation of the research teams involved.