Climate Change Impact Assessment on the Distributions of Crop Wild Relatives: A Global Perspective.

Crop wild relatives (CWR) are important sources of novel traits for crop improvement, possessing wide genetic diversity and a relatively close genetic relationship to cultivated species, enabling hybridization. Despite their potential value, many of these species are still underrepresented in ex situ collections and are thought to be threatened in their natural environments by a series of factors, including climate change. According to the IPCC Assessment Report Five (AR5), changes in the breadth of the geographical distribution of species and fragmentation of natural habitats can be expected as a result of climate change. Little is known, however, in regard to what this implies for crop wild relatives. Here we present the largest assessment of crop wild relative species responses under climate change to date. We analyzed the potential effects of climate change on the environmental niches of CWR species of 29 globally important crops (a total of 445 taxa) using species distributions models developed with Maxent. We identified areas and species where significant reductions in distributions and/or high levels of fragmentation are predicted. Using these results in combination with ex situ conservation prioritizations (Ramírez-Villegas et al., 2010), we identify key species in urgent need of collecting for genetic resources conservation.

Ramírez-Villegas J., C. Khoury, A. Jarvis, D.G. Debouck, and L. Guarino. 2010. A gap analysis methodology for collecting crop genepools: a case study with Phaseolus beans. PLoS ONE 5(10):e1349.