Larry Stritch

The use of crop wild relatives (CWR) in breeding is likely only to increase as utilization techniques improve and crop improvement under global change becomes more urgent. Significant gaps remain in the conservation of these genetic resources. Initial steps have been completed resulting in a CWR inventory of taxa occurring in the United States, with suggested prioritization of species based upon potential value in crop improvement. U.S. CWR are related to a broad range of important food, forage and feed, medicinal, ornamental, and industrial crops. Some potentially valuable CWR are threatened in the wild, including relatives of sunflower, walnut, squash, wild rice, raspberry, and plum. Few accessions of such taxa are currently conserved ex situ. Potential distribution models and richness maps for these taxa enabled the identification of hotspots of taxonomic diversity of CWR in the U.S. Our ‘gap analysis’ compared these models to the extent of germplasm conserved ex situ, enabling t...

The US Botanical Capacity Assessment Project (BCAP) was initiated as a first step to gauge the nation's collective ability to meet the environmental challenges of the 21st century. The project, in which the authors of this article are involved, specifically aimed to identify multisector contributions to and gaps in botanical capacity in order to develop growth opportunities to address research and management problems. One of the primary gaps revealed by the BCAP surveys was that the skills graduate students identified as their ...