Setting conservation priorities for crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent

Genet Resour Crop Evol https://doi.org/10.1007/s10722-017-0576-3 RESEARCH ARTICLE Setting conservation priorities for crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent Wathek Zair . Nigel Maxted . Ahmed Amri Received: 27 March 2017 / Accepted: 13 October 2017 Ó The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication Abstract The aim of this paper is to contribute directly to the systematic, long-term conservation of crop wild relatives (CWR) in the Fertile Crescent by setting conservation priorities to secure and improve CWR conservation in situ and ex situ as a means of underpinning global food security. We established the first priority list of CWR within the Fertile Crescent following several criteria comprising production value (m 9 p), projected production value (m 9 p), production area (ha), projected production area (ha), native status, energy supply (kcal/capita/day), protein supply (g/capita/day), fat supply (g/capita/day), occurrence status, gene pool, taxon group, and threat status. An inventory of 220 priority CWR was established for the Fertile Crescent region. We followed twelve prioritisation approaches and assessed 21,080 species. About 4% of the total species (835 species) were identified as CWR that have socio-economic value for the region. These 835 CWR species were prioritised to Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10722-017-0576-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. W. Zair (&)
N. Maxted School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK e-mail: A. Amri Genetic Resources Section, International Centre for Agricultural Research, Dry Areas (ICARDA), P.O. Box 6299, Rabat, Morocco create the CWR priority list which consisted of 220 species (1% of the total species assessed). The majority of the CWR priority list (185 species) were related to cereal, vegetable, and industrial crops and 35 of them are related to fruits and trees. The CWR priority list includes crop wild relatives of the genera Aegilops (20 species), Lactuca (11 species), Avena (11 species), Carthamus (11 species), Allium (9 species), Thinopyrum (10 species), and Triticum (3 species). We present the first inventory of 220 priority CWR for the Fertile Crescent. The inventory helps to improve in situ and ex situ conservation and the genetic diversity of CWR. Both the inventory and the methodology applied in prioritisation can be used in setting national, regional, and global conservation strategies. The recommendations will help the Fertile Crescent meet its targets in conserving CWR diversity as well as making sure that CWR genetic resources are preserved to prevent and tackle global food insecurity. Keywords Conservation
Prioritisation
Food security
Genetic diversity
Plant genetic resources Introduction Human population is increasing rapidly. It was estimated that the population will reach 11.2 billion by 2100 (UN 2017). That is why there is an urgent 123 Genet Resour Crop Evol need to improve crop varieties so we could produce more food and crops will be able to improve yield, are resistant to insects and diseases, can tolerate abiotic stress such as high temperature and drought (Araus et al. 2008). Crop wild relatives are species of plants that are genetically close to cultivated crops. They are an important source of plant genetic materials that can be used for crop improvements. CWR have genes that made them adapted to various stresses in their natural environments (Maxted et al. 2006). A CWR should be in Gene pool one or Gene pool two for the gene transfer to be done easily (Maxted et al. 2006). CWRs have been used to improve crops resistant to diseases, for example in Australia, a crop wild relative of wheat has been used successfully as a source of a gene which is resistant to cereal cyst nematode. The gene from the CWR was transferred to bread wheat (Appels and Lagudah 1990). CWRs have also been used to improve varieties’ resistant to stress, for example, Hordeum spontaneum K. Koch and Triticum dicoccoides Körn. the CWRs of barley and wheat have genes that can make them tolerate salty soil and drought (Nevo and Chen 2010). Crop wild relatives are threatened in their natural habitat, this is due to urbanization, constructing roads, deforestation, desertification, intensive farming, and erosion of soil and plant genetic resources, pollution of land and water, scarcity of water, overgrazing and the impact of climate change (El-Beltagy 2006; Derneg 2010). Trigo et al. (2010) state that climate change impacted negatively on the vegetation in the Fertile Crescent (Trigo et al. 2010). For all the above-mentioned reasons, there is an urgent need to conserve CWR in the Fertile Crescent and conserve their natural habitats. There are several CWR taxa around the world and the number was estimated to be approximately 50,000–60,000 species worldwide and of these approximately 10,740 of them are a high priority for food security (Maxted and Kell 2009). In the Fertile Crescent region, there is a red list assessment that was done for plants in Jordan. Nearly 40% (1072 species) of the flora in Jordan was red list assessed. The assessment found 106 species of the total species have been listed as threatened nationally with 19 species of them being critically endangered, 54 species being endangered, 33 as vulnerable and one species (Salvia farinacea) as regionally extinct (Taifour and El-Ohlah 2014). Authors have used a number of approaches for CWR prioritisation (Maxted et al. 1997; Mitteau and Soupizet 2000; Barazani et al. 123 2008; Ford-Lloyd et al. 2008; Maxted and Kell 2009; Magos Brehm et al. 2010). Magos Brehm et al. (2010) used nine prioritisation criteria (native status, economic value, ethnobotanical value, global distribution, national distribution, ex situ conservation status, in situ conservation status, legalisation, and threat assessment) and applied them to the Portuguese CWR. Species were listed based on their priority from high to low and the top 50 were identified. Those CWR species that were found to be a high priority were give prioritisation for conservation in Portugal (Magos Brehm et al. 2010). While in the United States, Khoury et al. (2013) used crop production and food supply data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations statistical database (FAOSTAT) giving a US priority list consisting of 821 CWR taxa (Khoury et al. 2013). Fielder et al. (2015) applied five prioritisation criteria: use of the related crop, commercial importance of the associated crop, native status, relatedness degree of the CWR to the crop, and latest change in the population to prioritise 148 CWR taxa (Fielder et al. 2015). Other authors when prioritising CWR taxa have used other combinations of prioritising criteria (Barazani et al. 2008), but related crop value, relative CWR relatedness (indicating potential ease of CWR use in breeding) (...truncated)