Crop Wild Relatives

The Crop Wild Relatives (CWR) Project is an international initiative focused on conserving crop wild relatives and helping make their genetic diversity available for crop improvement. Launched in 2011 as “Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: Collecting, Protecting and Preparing Crop Wild Relatives,” the 11-year project identified species in urgent need of attention and supported their collection, conservation, evaluation, and use in breeding.

Working with 47 collecting partnerships across 25 countries, the project gathered more than 4,500 seed samples. Its activities included global inventories and gap analyses to prioritize species and collection locations, as well as conserving samples in national and international collections. Through 62 partners in 34 countries, it also supported pre-breeding and evaluation for 19 crops, developing lines that can help transfer useful traits, such as disease resistance, into cultivated varieties. More than 14,000 pre-breeding lines are conserved in genebanks, and two commercial varieties derived from crop wild relatives have been released.