Enhancing Crop Genepool Use: Capturing Wild Relative and Landrace Diversity for Crop Improvement

Maintaining food security in the face of human population increase and climate change is one of the critical challenges facing us in the 21st Century. Utilisation of the full range of agrobiodiversity will be a necessary tool in addressing this challenge. In this book a team of international contributors review all aspects of utilization and conservation of crop wild relative (CWR) and landrace (LR) diversity as a basis for crop improvement and future food security. This book covers four key areas:· Characterization techniques - novel 'omics' techniques and predictive tools that can be used to identify adaptive traits and expedite plant breeding.· Conservation strategies - how to develop national, regional and global CWR and LR conservation strategies, how better to target conservation to meet the needs of the plant breeding community, and how to integrate CWR and LR diversity into existing biodiversity conservation programmes.· Facilitating CWR and LR use - pre-breeding using 'exotic' germplasm, meeting breeders' needs, integrating the conservation and user communities, and policy enhancement.· Informatics development - improving characterization, trait and conservation data management and accessibility, and inter-information system operability.