Presented by Hannes Dempewolf at the CCAFS Workshop on Developing Climate-Smart Crops for a 2030 World, ILRI, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 6-8 December 2011.

1. Adapting agriculture to climate change:
collecting, protecting andpreparing crop wild
relatives
Hannes Dempewolf - The Global Crop Diversity Trust
Developing Climate-Smart Crops for a 2030 World Workshop
ILRI, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 6-8 December 2011

2. What is the Global Crop Diversity Trust?
• Public-private partnership raising an endowment fund
that will provide continuous funding for key crop
diversity collections (starting with international
collections maintained by CGIAR Centres)
• Goal: “to advance an efficient and sustainable global
system of ex situ conservation by promoting the
rescue, understanding, use and long-term
conservation of valuable plant genetic resources”
• Part of the funding strategy of the International Treaty
for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
(ITPGRFA)

3. Genesys
http://www.genesys-pgr.org/

4. Svalbard Global Seed Vault

5. A global initiative on crop wild relatives
• Identify, collect, conserve, document and use key
crop wild relative diversity for climate change
adaptation (in developing countries)
• $50 million over 10 years pledged by Norwegian
government, starting 2011
• 26 target crops: alfalfa, apple, bambara
groundnut, banana, barley, bean, carrot, chickpea, c
owpea, eggplant, faba bean, finger
millet, grasspea, lentil, oat, pea, pearl millet, pigeon
pea, potato, rice, rye, sorghum, sunflower, sweet
potato, vetch and whea

6. Targeting “missing” diversity
Climatic niche model for P. acutifolius var. acutifolius
http://gisweb.ciat.cgiar.org/GapAnalysis/

7. Not just conservation
• Significant component of USE of collected and
conserved material
– Genotyping
– Phenotyping
– Pre-breeding

8. Pre-breeding
“It's a bit like crossing a house cat with a wildcat. You don't
automatically get a big docile pussycat. What you get is a lot of
wildness that you probably don't want Iying on your sofa.”

9. Possible CWR pre-breeding
and evaluation strategies
• Assess genetic diversity of accessions, pick set of diverse CWR
genotypes and cross with cultivars, create BCs and RILs and
evaluate
• First evaluate CWRs, then pick most promising genotypes and
use in pre-breeding with cultivated lines, evaluate again
• QTL (and MAS) approaches
• Candidate gene approach
…. ?

10. Survey of pre-breeding experts
1. Which wild species or population(s) of crop wild relatives do
you think should be targeted first and foremost?
2. Which wild species or population(s) do you feel are currently
under-represented in ex situ collections and should be targeted
during the collecting activities of this project?
3. Which traits would you target (especially with reference to
traits that are important in a climate change context)?
 So far a total of 84 expert responses were collected

11. We’d love to hear your opinion...
• Should collecting and pre-breeding focus on crop wild relative
species that are easiest to use or more difficult to use and less
well known but perhaps more interesting?
• Are there any particular traits that you would target in pre-
breeding and evaluation efforts (especially with regards to
climate change adaptation)?
• What kinds of outputs (e.g. pre-bred lines, sequence
information, evaluation data) of the project would be most
useful to you as breeders?
• What can be done to make breeders around the world aware of
the newly collected germplasm as well as the pre-bred lines that
will be produced as part of the project?

12. Please consider completing the survey…
… if you haven’t done so already.
Survey: http://goo.gl/08MX1
Or email: hannes.dempewolf@croptrust.org

13. Thank you for your attention!