Conservation Status and Threat Assessments for North American Crop Wild Relatives

Abstract

Conservation status and threat assessments evaluate species' relative risks of extinction globally, regionally, nationally, or locally, and estimate the degree to which populations of species are already safeguarded in existing conservation systems, with the aim of exposing the critical gaps in current conservation. Results of the assessments can therefore aid in directing limited conservation resources to the species and populations that are most at-risk. This chapter introduces the roles of conservation status and threat assessments in informing conservation priorities for crop wild relatives in North America, and provides an overview of the current results for U.S. taxa. Methods to assess the conservation status and to perform threat assessments for North American crop wild relatives are well developed via NatureServe and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, and the essential infrastructure to perform these analyses is present, at least in Canada and the U.S. Current conservation assessments for North American wild relatives need updating, but already reveal a landscape of multiple complex threats, and major gaps in the ex situ and in situ conservation of prioritized species. Further resources and concerted efforts are needed to update conservation assessments and then to use the results to inform efforts to fill the critical gaps in conservation.

Toward Integrated Conservation of North America's Crop Wild Relatives

“…Species inventories and conservation assessments have been generated for various taxa and for some geographic regions in North America (e.g., Wiersema et al 2012;Kantar et al 2015;Khoury et al 2013Khoury et al , 2015Castañeda-Álvarez et al 2015;Contreras-Toledo et al 2018;Greene et al 2019), but many land management areas have no comprehensive species lists, and for many species, assessments are either out of date or have not yet been performed (Frances et al 2018).…”

“…Alongside direct uses for human nutrition and cultural importance (Cruz-Garcia and Price 2014; Gascon et al 2015;Willis 2017), these plants offer valuable traits for crop breeding, including pest and disease resistance, and tolerance to climatic stresses (Hajjar and Hodgkin 2007;Dempewolf et al 2017). For these reasons, it is worrisome that the natural habitats of many North American crop wild relative and wild utilized plant populations are degraded or disappearing, and most species lack sufficient representation in public genebanks, botanical gardens, and other ex situ repositories (Zhang et al 2017;Frances et al 2018;Greene et al 2018bGreene et al , 2019.…”

A Road Map for Conservation, Use, and Public Engagement around North America's Crop Wild Relatives and Wild Utilized Plants

“…Understand and document North America's crop wild relatives and wild utilized plants, assess threats to their natural habitats, and determine gaps in their conservation. Species inventories and conservation assessments have been generated for various taxa and for some geographic regions in North America (e.g., Castañeda-Álvarez et al, 2015;Greene et al, 2019;Kantar et al, 2015;Khoury et al, 2013Khoury et al, , 2015Wiersema et al, 2012), but many land management areas have no comprehensive species lists, and for many species, assessments are either out of date or have not yet been performed (Frances et al, 2018).…”

“…Organizations across Canada, Mexico, and the United States are striving toward, or have expressed interest in, increasing the contribution of native wild species to food and nutrition security and to the sustainability of production systems. Conservation organizations are actively working to document the current state of protection of wild relatives (Frances et al, 2018). Land management agencies are responsible for balancing multiple use priorities over large portions of North America (IUCN, 2019).…”

Seeds of Success: Collateral Benefits to Agricultural Crop Improvement, Research, and Education

“…An in-depth assessment of the SOS collection is timely, considering that agriculturally relevant wild species, including the germplasm that breeders are turning to for climate-resilient crop development, are themselves vulnerable. These genetic resources are imperiled in their natural environments by habitat destruction, invasive species, climate change, and overharvesting (Maxted et al, 2012;Kell et al, 2017;Frances et al, 2018;Diaz et al, 2019) and are generally poorly represented in genebanks (Ford-Lloyd et al, 2011;more recently, Castañeda-Álvarez et al, 2016;Khoury et al, 2019).…”