Aim: The conservation and effective use of crop genetic diversity is crucial to overcome challenges related to human nutrition and agricultural sustainability. Farmers’ traditional varieties (“landraces”) are major sources of genetic variation. The degree of representation of crop landrace diversity in ex situ conservation is poorly understood, partly due to a lack of methods that can negotiate both the anthropogenic and environmental determinants of their geographic distributions. Here we describe a novel spatial modeling and...

Perennial grains could simultaneously provide food for humans and a host of ecosystem services, including reduced erosion, minimized nitrate leaching, and increased carbon capture. Yet most of the world’s food and feed is supplied by annual grains. Efforts to domesticate intermediate wheatgrass (Thinopyrumn intermedium, IWG) as a perennial grain crop have been ongoing since the 1980’s. Currently, there are several breeding programs within North America and Europe working toward developing IWG into a viable crop....

This supplement aims to substantiate and expand our comments made in the Letter to the Editor. This format as a separate document was necessary due to the complexity of the issues raised in our comments vis-à-vis the word limit of PNAS Letters (500 words). The text elaborates on individual concerns raised in the letter and also adds new aspects on the research quality that have not yet been discussed in the letter. Moreover, the supplement...

Current advances in sequencing technologies and bioinformatics revealed the genomic background of rice, a staple food for the poor people, and provided the basis to develop large genomic variation databases for thousands of cultivars. Proper analysis of this massive resource is expected to give novel insights into the structure, function, and evolution of the rice genome, and to aid the development of rice varieties through marker assisted selection or genomic selection. In this work we...

Effective assessments of the current status of biodiversity conservation are needed to support planning, policy, and action, from local to global levels. Of particular use would be well documented, reproducible methods based on openly accessible data and tools. Such methods should provide an accurate estimate of the state of conservation of diversity, identifying gaps in current conservation systems, while providing a benchmark against which to measure success, including determining when conservation goals have been met....