A team from the University of Birmingham in the U.K., and partners in China, have identified 871 wild plant species native to China that have the potential to adapt and maintain 28 globally important crops.

The study was done in response to questions on how the world's food supply can or will respond to climate change. Several models show that increased temperatures will render several grain-growing regions unable to generate the bumper-level yields of today.

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The crops include rice, wheat, soybean, sorghum, banana, apple, citrus fruits, grape, stone fruits and millet. Forty-two percent of these wild plant species, known as crop wild relatives (CWR) occur nowhere else in the world.

CWR are wild plant species closely related to crops, but can weather a broad range of environmental conditions, often tougher and more demanding. Having the ability to adapt, plants in their native habitats tend to have far more genetic diversity than farm crops, which are often clones and genetically homogeneous. Because of their diversity, varieties tend to be more resistant to disease, drought and swings in temperature.

"China has remarkable wild plant diversity," says Shelagh Kell, Research Fellow, School of Biosciences . "With more plant species than Europe and CWR of globally important food crops, its position as a provider of plant genetic resources for crop improvement is crucial to us all globally. Now that we have identified China's priority CWR and some of the hotspots in which they occur, stakeholders need to implement a strategy to secure their future." 

Scientists are splicing genes from identified Chinese wild varieties to strengthen farm-crop strains. Oryza rufipogon, a wild relative of rice, is used to confer tolerance to drought and aluminium toxicity; Glycine soja, has been tapped to improve protein content in soybean; and Vitis amurensis, a wild relative of grape, improves cold tolerance. Other wild varieties can increase crop yields and even visual aesthetics to increase marketability.

However, 17 percent of the 871 CWR native to China are listed as threatened with extinction. China's rapid industrial progress has often come with extreme environmental degradation, both on land and at sea. Not only are several wild plant species are endangered, many more have yet to be identified by science that have have potential in bolstering crop yields.

Says Kell, "Conservation planning and plant breeding knowledge is very advanced but the politics of establishing a network for in situ protection of CWR and for accessing plant material for crop improvement is incredibly complex. However, urgent attention needs to be paid to China's CWR to ensure that they are adequately conserved, so that this diversity is available for use in crop improvement programs before it is lost forever."

TagsCWR, food