Ninety-six percent of wild relatives of agricultural crops may represent an urgent or high conservation priority, a study finds. Wild plants related to domesticated crops are important genetic resources for breeding and food security. The use of these plants for crop improvement depends on their protection, which is constrained by a limited understanding of their geographic distribution and current conservation status. To address this knowledge gap and prioritize these plants for conservation, Colin Khoury and colleagues developed a national inventory, compiled occurrence information, modeled potential distributions, and conducted threat assessments and conservation gap analyses for 594 US-native wild relatives of important agricultural crops. Overall, the average conservation score was 24.9 out of 100. The crop types that had the largest proportions of taxa determined to be urgent conservation priorities included cereal, fruit, nut, root and tuber, sugar, and vegetable crop wild relatives. More than half of the taxa may be endangered or critically endangered in their natural habitats. The results suggest that additional habitat protection in the United States should be established in taxonomic richness hotspots in the Northeast, Midwest, West Coast, Mountain West, and Southeast. According to the authors, further conservation action involving wider collaborations and greater public awareness are needed to safeguard crop wild relatives and reach their full potential.
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Article #20-07029: "Crop wild relatives of the United States require urgent conservation action," by Colin Khoury et al.
MEDIA CONTACT: Colin Khoury, International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Cali, COLOMBIA; tel: 1-970-237-9571, 1-970-237-9571; e-mail: < c.khoury@cgiar.org >
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences