Colin Khoury, Visiting Research Scientist at International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) discusses the depth of the research phase in understanding the collection, conservation and breeding phases of the crop wild relatives project and the elements it involved.

It took a full four years to answer some seemingly innocent questions that guide the collecting, conservation, and breeding work within the CWR Project:

1. what constitutes a potentially useful wild relative of a crop?,
2. where are these species encountered?,
3. what is the state of ex situ conservation and thus availability of these species to crop breeders and other researchers, and
4. what are the highest priorities for further collecting to improve this state of conservation?

Answering each of these questions required the collation of vast amounts of systematic, geographic, and breeding knowledge, which was only possible through intensive collaboration with researchers around the world. The success of the research phase of the CWR project has thus been based upon the efficacy of the global interaction between taxonomists, geographers, conservationists, and plant breeders associated with herbaria, genebanks, breeding institutes, universities, and international and national agriculture and biodiversity institutions- an interaction that has been very fruitful.

– The Harlan and de Wet Crop Wild Relative Inventory is an online resource displaying the taxonomic relationships, general distributions, and associated information for crop wild relatives in the genepools of more than 100 of the world’s most important crops.

– The Crop Wild Relative Occurrence Database contains geographic information for these crop wild relatives gathered from hundreds of herbaria, genebanks, and researchers worldwide, totaling over 5 million records. This will be made searchable and available for download from the project website in this coming year.

– The Crop Wild Relative Global Atlas provides an interactive map platform to explore the occurrence data and resulting potential distribution maps built from that data for individual CWR species, crop genepools, and the world’s CWR as a whole. The Atlas also displays collecting priorities- those gaps in the worlds ex situ collections that can be filled through further collecting.

The project has been working hard both to improve the usability and to expand the capability of these resources. In the coming year, you will see improvements to the Inventory and the Atlas, and the mobilization of the Occurrence Database. In addition, further information on conservation analysis results and on the status of collecting and conservation activities will be provided. In the spirit of making our efforts maximally useful to the research community, we will also be making available the applications we have developed to collate and process taxonomic and geographic information, and we will publish the R code used to perform our conservation analyses. Both of these resources can be used by those interested in processing and analyzing data for conservation and genetic resources analyses. Finally, we have been collaborating with crop researchers on improving analyses for specific crop genepools, and these results will be published by crop in the coming months As we work to highlight the importance of CWR, we are excited about the power of these improvements in providing more comprehensive resources for those interested in the CWR of our food crops.

Written by :

Colin Khoury (PhD student in Plant Sciences) and Nora Castañeda-Álvarez (PhD student in Biosciences) who are part of the Crop Wild Relatives team of CIAT, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture