Setting conservation priorities for the wild relatives of food crops in Indonesia

Crop wild relatives (CWR) have been increasingly used as a genetic resource in crop improvement programs, thus, their conservation is essential for future sustainable agriculture and food security. Ex situ conservation and in situ conservation need better planning to ensure success. However, Indonesia as one of the important areas for CWR diversity does not yet have specific plans to conserve these resources. The basis for CWR conservation planning is having a prioritized inventory of CWR upon which to focus CWR conservation actions in Indonesia. Therefore, the initial CWR conservation planning steps reported in this paper are CWR checklist development and subsequent prioritization to permit better allocation of resources and time for conservation action.