Adapting agriculture to climate change: collecting, protecting andpreparing crop wild

relatives

Hannes Dempewolf - The Global Crop Diversity Trust

Developing Climate-Smart Crops for a 2030 World Workshop ILRI, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 6-8 December 2011

What is the Global Crop Diversity Trust?

• Public-private partnership raising an endowment fund that will provide continuous funding for key crop diversity collections (starting with international collections maintained by CGIAR Centres)

• Goal: “to advance an efficient and sustainable global system of ex situ conservation by promoting the rescue, understanding, use and long-term conservation of valuable plant genetic resources”

• Part of the funding strategy of the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA)

Genesys

http://www.genesys-pgr.org/

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

A global initiative on crop wild relatives

• Identify, collect, conserve, document and use key crop wild relative diversity for climate change adaptation (in developing countries)

• $50 million over 10 years pledged by Norwegian government, starting 2011

• 26 target crops: alfalfa, apple, bambara groundnut, banana, barley, bean, carrot, chickpea, cowpea, eggplant, faba bean, finger millet, grasspea, lentil, oat, pea, pearl millet, pigeon pea, potato, rice, rye, sorghum, sunflower, sweet potato, vetch and whea

Targeting “missing” diversity

http://gisweb.ciat.cgiar.org/GapAnalysis/

Climatic niche model for P. acutifolius var. acutifolius

Not just conservation

• Significant component of USE of collected and conserved material– Genotyping– Phenotyping– Pre-breeding

Pre-breeding

“It's a bit like crossing a house cat with a wildcat. You don't automatically get a big docile pussycat. What you get is a lot of

wildness that you probably don't want Iying on your sofa.”

Possible CWR pre-breeding and evaluation strategies

• Assess genetic diversity of accessions, pick set of diverse CWR genotypes and cross with cultivars, create BCs and RILs and evaluate

• First evaluate CWRs, then pick most promising genotypes and use in pre-breeding with cultivated lines, evaluate again

• QTL (and MAS) approaches• Candidate gene approach

…. ?

Survey of pre-breeding experts

1. Which wild species or population(s) of crop wild relatives do you think should be targeted first and foremost?

2. Which wild species or population(s) do you feel are currently under-represented in ex situ collections and should be targeted during the collecting activities of this project?

3. Which traits would you target (especially with reference to traits that are important in a climate change context)?

So far a total of 84 expert responses were collected

We’d love to hear your opinion...

• Should collecting and pre-breeding focus on crop wild relative species that are easiest to use or more difficult to use and less well known but perhaps more interesting?

• Are there any particular traits that you would target in pre-breeding and evaluation efforts (especially with regards to climate change adaptation)?

• What kinds of outputs (e.g. pre-bred lines, sequence information, evaluation data) of the project would be most useful to you as breeders?

• What can be done to make breeders around the world aware of the newly collected germplasm as well as the pre-bred lines that will be produced as part of the project?

Please consider completing the survey…

… if you haven’t done so already.

Survey: http://goo.gl/08MX1

Or email: hannes.dempewolf@croptrust.org

Thank you for your attention!