CROP WILD RELATIVES

A new website  [2] on CWR and climate change was recently launched by the Global Crop Diversity Trust  [3] in association with the Millennium Seed Bank  [4] 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  [5] (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.