Journal of Scientific Agriculture 2017, 1: 79-90 doi: 10.25081/jsa.2017.v1i0.34 http://updatepublishing.com/journals/index.php/jsa 79 INVITED ARTICLE Factors associated with agrobiodiversity conservation: A case study on conservation of rice varieties in Barak valley, Assam, India Nazimur Rahman Talukdar and Parthankar Choudhury* Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Assam University, Silchar 788011, India. Abstract Agrobiodiversity contributes to food security, increase productivity, economic returns and provides social, cultural and ecological functions. The present study aims to investigate the factors associated with agrobiodiversity conservation, with respect to the rice varieties in the Barak valley of Assam, India. Barak valley has high ecological and genetic diversity, and is one of the important regions of NE India in terms of agricultural productivity. More than 80% of the people of the Valley depend upon agricultural activities for their livelihood. Fieldwork included semi-structured interviews, visit to crop field (inventory) and survey to households to register seed exchange network, socio-economic characteristics and other factors influencing agrobiodiversity conservation. We used correlation analysis to know the association of various factors. Thirty six rice varieties were found to be traditionally conserved. Indegee refers to the number informants inform someone’s name when asked about their shareholders. For example, one informant name was informed by five people when asked to list the name of seed givers or receivers, then the informant would have an indegree of five. It was found that Farmers who had higher indegree conserved more traditional varieties than those farmers who had less indegree. It can be hypothesized that conservation of traditional varieties is related with various co-relating factors. Our findings will surely contribute to the conservation of genetic resources. Establishment of seed bank and application of vermicompost technique are suggested to check genetic erosion and fulfill the inadequacy of organic fertilizers. Key words: Human-wildlife conflict, In situ conservation, Socio-economic, South Assam Introduction Rice is world most used food crops, specially grown in humid tropical regions of the world, with favorable temperature range of 10-30°C. India harbors a large number of rice species because of its diverse climatic and geographic conditions. Many of the rice varieties are limited to the Gangetic plain of northern part of India. National bureau of plant genetic resources (NBPGR) identified about 2000 local landraces from major rice ecologies from North-Eastern India (Hore, 2005). Local farmers in general, practice traditional varieties based on the knowledge of the quality of rice varieties and their adaptation in various agro-ecological systems (Das and Das, 2014). However, during the latter half of the 20 th century, intensive agriculture for increasing crop yields to meet the growing demand for food has led to degradation of the natural resources upon which agriculture depends, viz., soil, water, and natural genetic diversity. From the last few decades biotechnological solution to increase food production has been increasing tremendously. As a result, farmers are motivated to use hybrid and high-yielding Received 29 April 2017; Revised 25 May 2017; Accepted 26 May 2017; Published 26 May 2017 *Corresponding Author Parthankar Choudhury Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Assam University, Silchar-788011, India. Email: parthankar.c@rediffmail.com; parthankar@rediffmail.com © This article is open access and licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted, use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, or format for any purpose, even commercially provided the work is properly cited. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.