Examples and applied use

Within the context of the ‘Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: Collecting, Protecting and Preparing Crop Wild Relatives’ project led by the Global Crop Diversity Trust and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and sponsored by the Norwegian Government, a web-enabled global priority inventory of CWR taxa was created, called the Harlan and de Wet Crop Wild Relative inventory. It is referred to as the Harlan and de Wet Crop Wild Relative inventory to acknowledge the pioneering work of Harlan and de Wet (1971) in first proposing the Gene Pool (GP) concept to explain the relative value of species in their potential as gene donors for crop improvement. The inventory contains background information on 173 food and agricultural crop gene pools and 1,667 priority CWR taxa from 37 families, 109 genera, 1392 species and 299 sub-specific taxa. The taxa included were deemed priority CWR based on their inclusion in GP1B or GP2, or Taxon Groups (TG)1B, 2 or 3 (see here for more information on the Gene Pool and Taxon Group concepts). There are also a limited number of GP3 and TG4 taxa included if they have previously been shown to be useful in breeding. Taxa are organized by genus in alphabetical order and according to the GP or TG concepts, and for each crop complex the following information is available: GP or TG concept source citation, Latin and common name, common synonyms, common vernacular names, country geographic distribution, previous or potential reported use in breeding, other uses, ex situ storage behaviour, and main herbaria with representative specimens. The inventory facilitates global and national conservation planning as, for the first time, a comprehensive and systematic list of global priority CWR taxa of the major and minor crops of the world is available.

Source: Vincent et al. (2013)