Fostering in situ conservation of wild relatives of forage crops

Christina Kägi; Blaise Petitpierre; Philipp Meyer; Yvonne Lötscher; Stefan Eggenberg; Sylvain Aubry

doi:10.3389/fpls.2023.1287430

Fostering in situ conservation of wild relatives of forage crops

Front Plant Sci. 2023 Oct 30:14:1287430. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1287430. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Christina Kägi^#¹, Blaise Petitpierre^#², Philipp Meyer¹, Yvonne Lötscher¹, Stefan Eggenberg², Sylvain Aubry¹

Affiliations

¹ Federal Office for Agriculture (FOAG), Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research EAER, Bern, Switzerland.
² Infoflora, c/o Botanischer Garten, Bern, Switzerland.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Most plant conservation strategies generally overlook the intra-specific genetic diversity of crop gene pools. Focusing on forage crops and their wild relatives, we present a novel approach to address the conservation of these species on meadows. Two-thirds of Swiss agricultural land is green land, mostly used for forage purposes, and their genetic diversity is being threatened. We focused here on eight plant associations gathering at least 18 taxa considered priority crop wild relatives of forage crops. Since 2020, about 1,217 high-quality surfaces (representing 1,566 hectares) nationwide have been integrated into an innovative auction-based policy instrument dedicated to conserving these populations. Here, we report the benefits and hurdles of implementing this bottom-up approach and try to estimate the quality of conservation of the forage plants' CWR gene pool. Although we focus on the Swiss case, our approach to in situ conservation offers opportunities to effectively guide conservation in other contexts. We also discuss possible ways to improve CWR conservation policy, particularly the need to better consider the populations and habitat levels.

Keywords: crop wild relatives; forage crops; genetic diversity; grassland; in situ conservation; species distribution modelling (SDM).

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture.