Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: A Synopsis of Coordinated National Crop Wild Relative Seed Collecting Programs across Five Continents

Abstract

The Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change Project set out to improve the diversity, quantity, and accessibility of germplasm collections of crop wild relatives (CWR). Between 2013 and 2018, partners in 25 countries, heirs to the globetrotting legacy of Nikolai Vavilov, undertook seed collecting expeditions targeting CWR of 28 crops of global significance for agriculture. Here, we describe the implementation of the 25 national collecting programs and present the key results. A total of 4587 unique seed samples from at least 355 CWR taxa were collected, conserved ex situ, safety duplicated in national and international genebanks, and made available through the Multilateral System (MLS) of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Plant Treaty). Collections of CWR were made for all 28 targeted crops. Potato and eggplant were the most collected genepools, although the greatest number of primary genepool collections were made for rice. Overall, alfalfa, Bambara groundnut, grass pea and wheat were the genepools for which targets were best achieved. Several of the newly collected samples have already been used in pre-breeding programs to adapt crops to future challenges.

Wild relatives of potato (Solanum L. sec. Petota) poorly sampled and unprotected in Colombia

“…The project also includes the international agricultural research centers of the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and other crop expert institutions. Activities of the project include inventory and prioritization of CWR, gap analysis to diagnose the state of ex situ and in situ conservation of CWR at the global and national levels, and collection missions in 25 countries (Eastwood et al., 2022). Successful collections of CWR under threat were carried out in Peru and Brazil, in some cases collecting germplasm without previous representation in the genebanks (Medeiros et al., 2021; Sotomayor et al., 2023).…”

Safeguarding plant genetic resources in the United States during global climate change

“…In particular, CWR can encompass allelic diversity that was not captured or maintained during the domestication bottleneck, and thus could be valuable sources of new traits for crop improvement. Assessments of the status of CWR both in situ and ex situ will guide future acquisition and preservation efforts on a national and global scale (Castañeda‐Álvarez et al., 2016; Dempewolf et al., 2014; Eastwood et al., 2022; Khoury, Carver, Greene et al., 2013, 2020; Ramirez‐Villegas et al., 2022; Vincent et al., 2019).…”

Maximizing the crop wild relative resources available to plant breeders for crop improvement

“…Some breeders today may still feel working with CWR is not worth the effort. However, the impact of climate change causing breeders to search more regularly for novel traits (McCouch et al, 2013;Dempewolf and Guarino, 2015), the fact that substantial funds are being devoted to the provision of pre-breed lines that already contains beneficial CWR traits for farmer and breeder usage (https://www.croptrust.org/work/projects/ the-bold-project/#c4667; Dempewolf et al, 2017), the increased ease of access to CWR germplasm (Kilian et al, 2021;Eastwood et al, 2022) and the rapid progress in gene editing techniques (Hartung and Schiemann, 2014;Wang et al, 2022) are making linkage drag minimal and means breeder's reluctance to use CWR diversity to maintain food security is less readily justified.…”