Green Plants in the Red: A Baseline Global Assessment for the IUCN Sampled Red List Index for Plants

Plants provide fundamental support systems for life on Earth and are the basis for all terrestrial ecosystems; a decline in plant diversity will be detrimental to all other groups of organisms including humans. Decline in plant diversity has been hard to quantify, due to the huge numbers of known and yet to be discovered species and the lack of an adequate baseline assessment of extinction risk against which to track changes. The biodiversity of many remote parts of the world remains poorly known, and the rate of new assessments of extinction risk for individual plant species approximates the rate at which new plant species are described. Thus the question ‘How threatened are plants?’ is still very difficult to answer accurately. While completing assessments for each species of plant remains a distant prospect, by assessing a randomly selected sample of species the Sampled Red List Index for Plants gives, for the first time, an accurate view of how threatened plants are across the world. It represents the first key phase of ongoing efforts to monitor the status of the world’s plants. More than 20% of plant species assessed are threatened with extinction, and the habitat with the most threatened species is overwhelmingly tropical rain forest, where the greatest threat to plants is anthropogenic habitat conversion, for arable and livestock agriculture, and harvesting of natural resources. Gymnosperms (e.g. conifers and cycads) are the most threatened group, while a third of plant species included in this study have yet to receive an assessment or are so poorly known that we cannot yet ascertain whether they are threatened or not. This study provides a baseline assessment from which trends in the status of plant biodiversity can be measured and periodically reassessed

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

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.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Adapting agriculture to climate change: a synopsis of Coordinated National Crop Wild Relative Seed Collecting Programs across five continents.

Na publicação: Marcelo B. Medeiros

State of the world’s plants and fungi 2020

Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi project provides assessments of our current knowledge of the diversity of plants and fungi on Earth, the global threats that they face, and the policies to safeguard them. Produced in conjunction with an international scientific symposium, Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi sets an important international standard from which we can annually track trends in the global status of plant and fungal diversity

Crop wild phylorelatives (CWPs): phylogenetic distance, cytogenetic compatibility and breeding system data enable estimation of crop wild relative gene pool classification

Contains fulltext : 229139.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access

Prioritising crop wild relatives to enhance agricultural resilience in sub‐Saharan Africa under climate change

Social Impact Statement Climate change is expected to disproportionately affect sub-Saharan Africa in the next century, posing a threat to the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and deepening food insecurity. To adapt to this threat, more climate-resilient crops need to be brought into the food system; these may be developed through breeding with crop wild relatives with key traits to cope with climate change. Here, we assess the level of open-access trait documentation of crop wild relatives of 29 important crops, their resilience, how threatened they are in situ, how well they are preserved ex situ and we provide priorities for their conservation and use in breeding programmes. Summary - Climate change is projected to adversely affect smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over the next century, with many areas becoming unsuitable for growing crops. Breeding programmes using crop wild relatives (CWRs) that are pre-adapted to projected future climatic conditions may lead to more resilient crops, but their traits have not been screened across a large diversity of CWRs. Furthermore, many are threatened and require greater protection in situ and ex situ to prevent the loss of an important adaptive solution to climate change. - A previous ecogeographical study found that 303 out of 836 CWRs of 29 major crops cultivated across SSA may represent priorities for future crop resilience. Here, we assessed the availability of trait information and compared traits between resilient and non-resilient CWRs. Subsequently, we analysed the conservation status of CWRs in situ and ex situ to set new global priorities for protection. - Our findings show that the traits of many CWRs are poorly described, but for those species with better coverage, key differences between resilient and non-resilient CWRs were identified, including lower plant height amongst resilient CWRs of tree crops (arabica and robusta coffee, mango and cacao) and a higher likelihood of invasive CWRs to be resilient. We found that 14% and 36% of resilient CWRs are threatened in situ and absent from seed collections, respectively. - Our study highlights CWR priorities for conservation based on resilience. A concerted international effort is recommended to conserve CWRs and improve agricultural resilience in a changing climate