Congratulations to our friend and occasional contributor Colin Khoury and to his co-authors on the paper “An Inventory of Crop Wild Relatives of the United States.” The paper has been named “Outstanding Paper on Plant Genetic Resources in 2014″ by the Division C-8 Plant Genetic Resources of the Crop Science Society of America. Richly deserved. The data on which the paper is based can be found on the Crop Wild Relatives and Climate Change webpage.
This detailed paper prioritizes 285 native taxa from 30 genera that are most closely related to major food crops. In addition to ex situ conservation, the management of such taxa in protected areas is recommended.
I agree with the need for ex situ but in situ for CWRs is opening a can of worms. The paper nowhere accepts that CWRs (of value for breeding crops against pests and diseases) are hosts to these same pests and diseases. Maintain CWRs in situ and you of necessity maintain all the nasties that suppress crop production (there is more about this in the Prescott-Allens’ Genes from the Wild p. 93)
As an example of the dangers of in situ conservation, the native North American crop sunflower (Helianthus annuus) has a further 50 wild species native to North America. Maintaining these CWRs – with their associated pathogens and pests – in situ must inflict a yield penalty on sunflower. Such is the burden of this in the USA, where presumably sunflower is locally adapted, is that the USA only grows 3.5% of global sunflower production. In contrast Eastern Europe – with no native Helianthus – grows 66% of global production.