**Author details**

*Landraces - Traditional Variety and Natural Breed*

**6.4 Optimum conservation strategy for indigenous chicken genetic resources**

The combination of ex situ and in situ conservation could be optimal for IC genetic resources [24, 109, 133]. Ex situ in vivo conservation could maintain diverse NICs in production and genetic improvement facilities with well-defined improvement programme [23, 109] that aim to preserve heritable variations, prevent fixation of deleterious alleles, and retain high reproductive fitness and adaptive potential [109] while in situ conservation would maintain ICs as on-farm populations. The segregation of conserved and genetic improvement populations will enable a separated but connected programme whereby conserved populations feed genetic improvement while maintaining high genetic diversity to ensure resilience and adaptability [109]. On-farm conservation implemented with well defined, and appropriately valued productive and adaptive traits, with market niches for all potentials, and with well informed, and adequately motivated IC farmers, will serve as reservoir of raw genetic diversity and together with ex situ populations, supply critical materials for conservation in gene banks. To determine appropriate compensation for rearing ICs, the model proposed by [133] for determining compensation for on-farm conservation of landrace crop varieties could be adopted. Using this model, economic incentive or compensation is the difference in net revenue or net profit between IC and exotic chicken production by each participating farmer. A number of national and international agencies are deploying this economic incentive strategy to encourage farmers to conserve landrace crops on-farm [133]. To secure effective cooperation, communities must be made aware of the costs and benefits of interventions, the capacity of proposed actions to achieve set objectives, and the economic benefits accruable to the farmer and community [133]. A rational farmer will usually shift from IC or exotic chicken production after comparing the expected annual profit of each enterprise. The proposed compensation framework will help to determine the critical diversity to conserve, the current diversity that maximizes total productivity, the risk of diversity loss due to changing economic, production and technological constraints and the optimal cost of

Critical to NIC conservation is proper characterization and economic valuation to enhance conservation value [6, 16, 108, 109]. Characterization should aim at comprehensive knowledge of the ecotype phenotypic and genotypic characteristics including data on population size and structure, geographical distribution, the production environment, and within and between breed genetic diversity [109, 122]. Conservation value is enhanced by appraisal of the relative importance of NICs from the farmer's perspective and the value placed on the characteristics, and maintenance of IC diversity [109, 122]; creation of appropriate breeding objectives to maximize the value and contribution of ICs to livelihood, and food security; and provide incentives including knowledge and infrastructure for local communities to keep and maintain IC genetic resources in their respective ecological context, thereby achieving conservation as well as maintaining rural livelihood and food security. Conservation priority should be given to ICs proven to be free of admixes of foreign genetic elements, and should be focused on the zones that contain maxi-

mum IC diversity to minimize the cost of conservation [108, 133].

Nigerian ICs are a genetically complex and critical animal genetic resource characterized by unique genetic attributes, diversity, and heritable variations. Conservation of the total diversity of NICs is very crucial because genetic

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**7. Conclusion**

conservation [133].

Cosmas Chikezie Ogbu Department of Veterinary Biochemistry and Animal Production, College of Veterinary Medicine, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture Umudike, Abia State, Nigeria

\*Address all correspondence to: ogbu.cosmas@mouau.edu.ng; ccogbu07@gmail.com

© 2021 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
