The lead author of a new study on the important role wild plants play in food crop diversity and climate mitigation calls for greater conservation efforts.
Agriculture is this ironic field that requires genetic diversity to persist, but also is always reducing this diversity down. That reduction has to do with our modern system, with technology and the fact that you need uniformity in the field to make industrial-scale agriculture happen.
JANUARY 25, 2021
The wild plants that grow along our roadsides and ditches—like the salt-tolerant wild sunflowers and disease-resistant wild pumpkins—may hold crucial traits that can protect our food supply. Breeding commercial food crops using their wild relatives can help those crops become more pest and disease-resistant and resilient in the face of climate change. But according to a new study, many of the “crop wild relatives” are endangered in their natural habitats and in dire need of conservation.
Colin K. Khoury, the study’s lead author, has been a long-time advocate of wild plants and food crop diversity. He has worked for seed companies and seed conservation nonprofits, including Native Seeds/SEARCH. He currently works (remotely) for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia and is also a researcher at Saint Louis University, based at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Ft. Collins, Colorado facility.
Civil Eats spoke with Khoury about the study, the threats to these plants, and what can be done to help crop wild relatives thrive.
You have written that “the future is going to be a lot wilder and weedier” and that this wildness and weediness will be key to our success. Why are these wild relatives so important to our future?
Agriculture is this ironic field that requires genetic diversity to persist, but also is always reducing this diversity down. That reduction has to do with our modern system, with technology and the fact that you need uniformity in the field to make industrial-scale agriculture happen. It also has to do to do with the small number of seed companies. At the same time, diversity enables agriculture to deal with pests and diseases; if you have the same plants in the field, it’s a lot easier for a pest to “unlock” that variety and eat it all.
In more traditional systems, farmers plant lots of different crops and varieties. Conventional agriculture, on the other hand, gets away with uniformity by every few years changing the varieties that are grown. This means plant breeders go to the seed banks and find new traits. They’re continually mixing and matching. And our crops’ wild ancestors are the major source of this genetic diversity.
On top of that, climate change is forcing agriculture to change faster. Even the coldest average temperatures are now a lot hotter than they used to be. So, plant breeders need to find varieties of wheat or corn that are more tolerant to heat. Those traits can be found in the wild relatives. They’re the plants that thousands of years ago people figured out how to domesticate.
Read more
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Crop wild relatives of the United States require urgent conservation action
Abstract
The contributions of crop wild relatives (CWR) to food security depend on their conservation and accessibility for use. The United States contains a diverse native flora of CWR, including those of important cereal, fruit, nut, oil, pulse, root and tuber, and vegetable crops, which may be threatened in their natural habitats and underrepresented in plant conservation repositories. To determine conservation priorities for these plants, we developed a national inventory, compiled occurrence information, modeled potential distributions, and conducted threat assessments and conservation gap analyses for 600 native taxa. We found that 7.1% of the taxa may be critically endangered in their natural habitats, 50% may be endangered, and 28% may be vulnerable. We categorized 58.8% of the taxa as of urgent priority for further action, 37% as high priority, and 4.2% as medium priority. Major ex situ conservation gaps were identified for 93.3% of the wild relatives (categorized as urgent or high priority), with 83 taxa absent from conservation repositories, while 93.1% of the plants were equivalently prioritized for further habitat protection. Various taxonomic richness hotspots across the US represent focal regions for further conservation action. Related needs include facilitating greater access to and characterization of these cultural-genetic-natural resources and raising public awareness of their existence, value, and plight.
Study available here
