New website launched on CWR and climate change

A new website on CWR and climate change was recently launched by the Global Crop Diversity Trust in association with the Millennium Seed Bank of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, as part of the project “Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: Collecting, Protecting, and Preparing Crop Wild Relatives”. Focusing on the CWR of 26 key crops, the website is set to act as a data repository, providing information on the taxonomy, distribution, conservation status and breeding potential of crops of major importance to food security that fall under Annex 1 of the  International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (3.3 MB) (3.3 MB). Although still in the making and ready to be populated with new information the project will make available, the website has the potential to become a useful resource for breeders and farmers interested in using wild relatives of major crops for adapting agriculture to climate change. A number of resources such as checklists, papers and slideshows on potato breeding are already available for consultation.