http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/889133619

Crop wild relative conservation and use

This chapter summarizes a methodology for establishing a regional catalogue of crops and their wild relatives for the Euro-Mediterranean region. The Catalogue is made available through the web-enabled Crop Wild Relative Information System (CWRIS) (PGR Forum, 2005), which provides access to CWR information to a broad user community, including plant breeders, protected area managers, policy makers, conservationists, taxonomists and the wider public - information that is vital for the sustainable utilization and conservation of CWR. The Catalogue has been created using a systematic approach that can accommodate changes in nomenclature and status, and can be applied at both regional and national levels in any part of the world. In addition to providing an online information resource, the actual Catalogue data can be analysed to provide statistics on the crop and CWR taxa of the region. This chapter provides information on the number of crop and crop wild relative (CWR) taxa in the Euro-Mediterranean region and how many are native and endemic; the number of crop and CWR species present in individual nations and intranational regions; the number of species within and shared by the different crop groups; the number of worldwide crop genera that are found in the region; the major and minor food crops of the world that are native to the Euro-Mediterranean region and those that have wild relatives in the region. The Catalogue data can also be compared with taxon lists from existing conservation initiatives to establish which species are currently conserved and/or have undergone conservation assessment as a step towards the recognition and inclusion of CWR in current conservation programmes - some examples of this are given here.

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