An inventory of crop wild relatives and wild-utilized plants in Canada

In the face of global pressures of change and biodiversity loss, crop wild relatives (CWR) and wild-utilized plants (WUS) urgently require conservation attention. To advance conservation, the authors assembled a national inventory of CWR and WUS in Canada. To assess current ex situ conservation, they gathered a virtual metacollection of CWR and WUS accession data from national genebanks and from botanical gardens. The inventory includes 779 CWR and WUS taxa (658 distinct species), with 263 (222 distinct species) that are related to food crops of global and national importance such as blueberry and cranberry, apple, stone fruits, strawberry, sunflower and saskatoon. To promote further conservation, authors present a web application that enables conservation planners and practitioners to identify local CWR and WUS diversity and to identify within-species ecogeographic types that are underrepresented in ex situ conservation systems.