Enhancing the Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives in England

RESEARCH ARTICLE Enhancing the Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives in England Hannah Fielder1*, Peter Brotherton2, Julian Hosking3, John J. Hopkins4, Brian FordLloyd1, Nigel Maxted1 1 School of Biosciences, The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 2 Natural England, Unex House, Bourges Boulevard, Peterborough, United Kingdom, 3 Natural England, Riverside Chambers, Castle Street, Taunton, Somerset, United Kingdom, 4 Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, Penryn, Cornwall, United Kingdom * Abstract OPEN ACCESS Citation: Fielder H, Brotherton P, Hosking J, Hopkins JJ, Ford-Lloyd B, Maxted N (2015) Enhancing the Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives in England. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0130804. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0130804 Academic Editor: Swarup Kumar Parida, National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), INDIA Received: March 6, 2015 Accepted: May 26, 2015 Published: June 25, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Fielder et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Access to occurrence data records in the BSBI distribution database (http:// bsbidb.org.uk) can be requested from Kevin Walker (). Accession data is available without restriction from the UK National Plant Inventory (https://www.google.com/fusiontables/ DataSource?docid=1WYDRRhsRq2oAe6jhB4rV4c1e ?Rc1yMzIhcCCUp7s#chartnew:id=8), additional accession data from the Millennium Seed Bank can be requested from Dr Ruth Eastwood (r.eastwood@kew. org). The English CWR checklist and inventory of priority CWR is available without restriction from the Humans require resilient, rapidly renewable and sustainable supplies of food and many other plant-derived supplies. However, the combined effects of climate change and population growth compromise the provision of these supplies particularly in respect to global food security. Crop wild relatives (CWR) contain higher genetic diversity than crops and harbour traits that can improve crop resilience and yield through plant breeding. However, in common with most countries, CWR are poorly conserved in England. There is currently no provision for long-term CWR conservation in situ, and comprehensive ex situ collection and storage of CWR is also lacking. However, there is a commitment to achieve their conservation in England’s Biodiversity Strategy and the UK has international commitments to do so as part of the Global Plant Conservation Strategy. Here, we identify a series of measures that could enhance the conservation of English CWR, thereby supporting the achievement of these national and international objectives. We provide an inventory of 148 priority English CWR, highlight hotspots of CWR diversity in sites including The Lizard Peninsula, the Dorset coast and Cambridgeshire and suggest appropriate sites for the establishment of a complementary network of genetic reserves. We also identify individual in situ and ex situ priorities for each English CWR. Based on these analyses, we make recommendations whose implementation could provide effective, long-term conservation of English CWR whilst facilitating their use in crop improvement. Introduction The most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that crop yields will decrease by an average of 2% per decade due to the negative impacts of climate change; with more severe forecasts expected beyond 2050 [1]. This worrying statistic is compounded by another equally concerning prediction that the rise in the human population over the next 90 years [2] will require global food production to increase by up to 70% [3,4]. In order to ensure future food security, not only will crop yields need to increase significantly but PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0130804 June 25, 2015 1 / 21 Conserving English CWR Plant Genetic Resources Diversity Gateway (http:// pgrdiversity.bioversityinternational.org). Funding: The authors acknowledge the EU Seventh Framework Programme funded project, PGR Secure "Characterization of biodiversity resources for wild crop relatives to improve crops by breeding" (Grant agreement no. 266394) for providing the financial support for this project. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. the crops themselves will need to become progressively more resilient to changing conditions. As a result, plant breeders are now looking to crop wild relatives (CWR) and, more specifically, the largely untapped gene pool of genetic diversity within them as the key to tackling these issues through conventional plant breeding [5]. CWR are the wild plants related to crops of socio-economic value, such as human food and animal forage and fodder crops as well as those used for medicinal, forestry, industrial and ornamental purposes etc. Though the conservation of CWR related to all plant-derived supplies is strongly encouraged, the focus of this paper is in the context of CWR related to human food and animal forage and fodder crops in order to address the pressing issue of food security. In contrast to their cultivated relatives, CWR have not passed through the genetic bottleneck of domestication [6]. As such, CWR harbour higher levels of genetic diversity and potentially contain a range of traits that could be used for crop improvement to increase the resilience and yield of modern crop varieties. The closeness of the relationship between a crop and its CWR can be defined in terms of the Gene Pool (GP) concept [7], where genes in CWR belonging to the primary Gene Pool (GP1b) of a crop can easily be transferred to the crop (belonging to GP1a). CWR in the secondary gene pool (GP2) can be crossed with the crop with some success but CWR in the tertiary gene pool (GP3) require biotechnological approaches to facilitate gene transfer [7]. However, gene pool studies are often lacking, particularly for less studied crops, and so the Taxon Group (TG) concept relying upon traditional taxonomic analyses of relatedness can be employed to define this relationship [5]. In this case, TG1a corresponds to the crop/GP1a, TG1b denotes CWR belonging to the same species as the crop, TG2 denotes CWR belonging to the same section as the crop, TG3 being those belonging to the same subgenus and finally TG4 being those belonging to the same genus as the crop. Those CWR where gene transfer to a related crop is possible can contribute significantly to improving crop varieties, and their use in this way will become increasingly important [8,9]. An extensive literature exists detailing examples of the use of CWR in crop improvement [10]. The introduction of Cercospora leaf spot and Rhizom (...truncated)