Abstract
With increase in human and livestock population, worldwide increasing in deforestation and land degradation has become the matter of global importance. Particularly in developing countries, productive forests and fertile lands are shrinking at an alarming rate developing imbalance in demand and supply relationship imbalanced. Another concern is the depletion of genetic resource of potentially important species either as a result of indiscriminate devegetation or insufficient efforts to preserve and maintain germplasm collections. Agro forestry (AF), as a complete farming system, has recently received attention and MPTS (multipurpose trees and shrubs) are considered as its integral component. They occupy prime importance for having potential and vital role in sustainable agricultural development. The importance of MPTS in meeting human needs for wood and its products and sustaining soil productivity is being increasingly recognized. Some hundreds of species have been considered to have multiple uses. MPTS extremely vary for their natural distribution and variation, methods of exploration, collection and evaluation of their germplasm. In this paper, an attempt has been made to explore the role of MPTS in sustainable agricultural development and the strategies for germplasm acquisition, evaluation and preservation.
