The conservation of the Italian Crop Wild Relatives in the RIBES seed-banks: first data to establish national inventories and conservation priorities.

Abstract

Crop Wild Relatives (CWR), a component of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (PGRFA), are wild species closely related to crops, including their progenitors, defined by their potential ability to contribute beneficial traits for crop improvement (Maxted et al., 2006; Vincent et al., 2013). CWR populations are particularly likely to contain the adaptive genes necessary to develop new varieties because of the wide variety of habitats in which they grow and broad range of conditions they are adapted to, so their genetic diversity offers an insurance against the predicted harmful impacts of climate change on biodiversity and food security, together with the growing world population (FAO, 2008; Vincent et al., 2013). On the other hand, CWRs, which are intrinsically no different to any other group of wild species, are subject to an increasing range of threats in their host habitats, then a more systematic attention to their conservation is required (Maxted & Kell, 2009; Bilz et al., 2011; Vincent et al., 2013). Particularly, a concerted effort devoted to improving the conservation and availability of CWRs for crop improvement is thus timely both for biodiversity conservation and for food security objectives, as the window of opportunity to resolve these deficiencies will not remain open indefinitely (Vincent et al., 2013; Castañeda-A� lvarez et al., 2016). In such contest, a census of CWRs of species of food and forage interest listed in the Annex I ‘Priority crops’ of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (FAO, 2001) was carried out in 2014 by the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA), based on Landucci et al. (2014) and the CWR and Wild Harversted Plants published at http://vnr.unipg.it/PGRSecure (Andreella et al. 2015), in order to quantify the extent of CWR representation in the Italian ex situ collections. Here, we present the updated results of such census in the Italian Seed Bank Network for native species conservation (RIBES) with an analysis of the contribution to the conservation of the Italian FAO priority CWR. Finally, a national priority list for conservation of CWRs was drawn up and proposed here