State of ex situ conservation of landrace groups of twenty five major crops
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Ramirez-Villegas, Julian | Khoury, Colin K. | Achicanoy, Harold A. | Diaz, María Victoria | Mendez, Andres C. | Sosa, Chrystian C. | Kehel, Zakaria | Guarino, Luigi | Abberton, M. T. | Aunario, Jorrel | Awar, Bashir Al | Alarcon, Juan Carlson | Amri, Ahmed | Anglin, Noelle L. | Azevedo, Vania | Aziz, Khadija | Capilit, Grace Lee | Chavez, Oswaldo | Dmytro, Chebotarov | Costich, Denise E. | Debouck, Daniel G. | Ellis, David | Falalou, Hamidou | Fiu, Albert | Ghanem, Michael Edmond | Giovannini, Peter | Goungoulou, Alphonse J. | Gueye, Badara | El Hobyb, Amal Ibn | Jamnadass, Ramni | Jones, Chris S. | Kpeki, Bienvenu | Lee, Jae-Sung | McNally, Kenneth L. | Muchugi, Alice | Ndjiondjop, Marie-Noelle | Oyatomi, Olaniyi | Payne, Thomas S. | Ramachandran, Senthil | Rossel, Genoveva | Roux, Nicolas | Ruas, Max | Sansaloni, Carolina | Sardos, Julie | Setiyono, Tri Deri | Tchamba, Marimagne | van den Houwe, Ines | Velazquez, J Alejandro | Venuprasad, Ramaiah | Wenzl, Peter | Yazbek, Mariana | Zavala, Cristian
Crop landraces provide unique local agro-ecological and societal functions and services, and represent important genetic resources for plant breeding globally. Despite many decades of concern over the erosion of their diversity, and, in response, sustained efforts to conserve landraces in ex situ repositories, the degree to which these cultivated populations are protected and available for use remains poorly understood. Here we modelled the potential distributions of landraces of 25 cereal, pulse, and starchy root, tuber, and fruit crops within their geographic regions of diversity worldwide. We then analyzed the extent to which the genetic diversity of landraces are represented in genebank collections using geographical coverage as a proxy for coverage of genetic diversity. We find that ex situ conservation is currently moderately comprehensive on average, with substantial variation among crops (mean of 63% ± 12.6 of distributions represented ex situ). Breadfruit, banana and plantain, lentil, common bean, chickpea, barley, and bread wheat landraces are among the most fully represented, while the largest conservation gaps persist for pearl millet, yam, finger millet, groundnut, potato, and pea. Geographic areas identified as priorities for further collecting of landraces are concentrated in hotspots in South Asia, the Mediterranean and West Asia, Mesoamerica, West, East, and Southern Africa, the Andean mountains of South America, and in Central and East Asia. With further progress made to fill these gaps, a high degree of representation of landrace diversity in genebanks globally is feasible, thus fulfilling international targets regarding their ex situ conservation.
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