Conserving Crop Diversity: Connecting Agriculture, Public Gardens, and Science

Abstract

Images clockwise from top: The annual trial garden at Colorado State University (source: Gayle Volk); the corn and maize seed collection at the USDA gene bank in Ames, IA (source: Devin Dotson, U.S. Botanic Garden); and Tunisian wild carrot (Daucus aureus). Source: Colin Khoury. Like a good first date, the “match” that Moreau and her team create could be a step toward a beautiful, lifelong relationship with the natural world. A 2017 Pew Research poll showed that most Americans see science and technology centers as reliable sources of science information (https://pewrsr.ch/2pfmGmJ). Botanical gardens, then, serve as important points of contact between scientists and researchers and the general public. Public outreach was just one of the drivers that encouraged another botanical garden researcher, Ari Novy, to team up with Moreau back in 2015. The pair was looking for a way to marry two worlds: horticulture and agriculture. As Moreau puts it, “A lot of people in agriculture started out in horticulture—people see the fields as quite different…but it's all growing plants.” Novy, an ASA, CSSA, and SSSA member and Director/CEO of the San Diego Botanic Garden, was a key player in finding funding for the Societies and the American Public Garden Association (APGA) to collaborate. Novy brought together researchers and other professionals from both organizations with funding from the USDA-NIFA. The team created a symposium with two primary goals to highlight plant diversity, particularly through crop wild relatives, and to focus on public engagement with emphasis on agriculture education. More than 100 horticulturists, botanical gardens researchers, agriculture scientists, land managers, conservation NGOs, and public outreach professionals gathered for the symposium in Des Moines, IA in April 2019, titled “Celebrating Crop Diversity: Connecting Agriculture, Public Gardens, and Science.” The three-day event was jam-packed with activities designed to foster connections between researchers and individuals who may not realize how closely their work is connected. “You're meeting people who are all working along a supply chain that have rarely met,” Moreau says. “They're coming together, and they might never even have seen themselves as a part of this larger supply chain.” Moreau passionately describes the way that botanical gardens can conserve valuable biodiversity by collecting and maintaining seeds and growing plants in living collections while breeders and agricultural researchers can test the wild relatives in conjunction with modern crops to develop valuable traits like drought and salinity tolerance, disease and pest resistance, and increased nutrition. The organizers kept the conference small in order to increase networking and connections. “We really imagined a two- or three-day event where the community really coalesced and got to know one another,” Novy says. “That just doesn't happen the same way with 500 or 1,000 people.” The conference featured keynote speakers like Marie Haga, the Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and Gary Nabhan, a nature writer, activist, and ethnobotanist. The group took field trips to the Iowa State University Seed Science Center, the Reiman Gardens, and the USDA-ARS North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station, part of the National Plant Germplasm System, and one of the largest gene banks in the United States. “There's a lot of people that dabble in crop wild relatives, but there's not a lot of cohesion and connection,” Moreau says. “As a topic, it lends itself very well to agricultural researchers and botanical gardens because there's gaps in terms of having those plants backed up in living collections and seed collections, yet it informs so closely the breeding and agricultural areas.” The symposium was more than just a valuable learning experience: Novy and Moreau collaborated again as guest editors of a special section in the November–December 2019 issue of Crop Science featuring more than 10 articles presented at and inspired by the conference. The special section includes one key article that lays out the future course of action between botanical gardens and agricultural researchers. Top row, l to r: courtesy of Gayle Volk, Davie Hansen, and Beiquan Mou. Center image (apples) courtesy of David Hansen. Images on the bottom row (corn and wheat) courtesy of David Hansen. Both Novy and Moreau emphasize that they wanted this symposium to be more than just a yearly meeting—they want long-term action to come from their collaboration. One of the key outcomes of the symposium was the development of a “Road Map” outlining the steps that both the agriculture and botanic garden communities want to take—in concert with land managers, educators, and others interested in native plant diversity—to increase conservation efforts and awareness of North America's biodiversity, particularly crop wild relatives. The five key priorities, as laid out in the article, “Road Map for the Conservation, Use, and Public Engagement around North America's Crop Wild Relatives” (https://doi.org/10.2135/cropsci2019.05.0309), are highlighted in the box above. Colin Khoury, a CSSA member and USDA-ARS researcher at the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation in Colorado, was one of the authors of the article. He says it summarizes collective feedback from individuals carefully selected by the authors who represent as many groups as possible that may be interested in native plant conservation and biodiversity in an effort to represent the needs and interests of the people and organizations who attended the symposium and who will be instrumental in carrying out the priorities within the Road Map. Khoury, in his day-to-day research, is heavily involved in the collection and conservation of that genetic diversity. Several common crops have wild relatives native to North America, including chile peppers, squashes and pumpkins, sunflowers, and corn. “We work to try and figure out who the species are, where they live, how well we have them conserved right now, and what we should do about it to fill in the gaps,” Khoury says. Filling in the gaps is not just about collecting a sample or two of a wild species in one area, but includes sampling populations across various regions to conserve a wide range of genetic diversity. Currently, the Wild Chile Botanical Area near Tuscon, AZ is, as Khoury puts it, “one of the only reserves in the United States with explicit prioritization of the conservation of a crop wild relative.” It's this fact that led Khoury to emphasize the importance of education related to crop wild relatives, particularly with land managers. “Increasingly we've been trying to understand their conservation in their natural habitats,” Khoury says. “That is, how many of their populations occur in protected areas like national parks or forests? Do the people who manage those areas know about them or just think they're weeds? My work is not just about the seed bank anymore, it's about talking with other folks like the Forest Service to see if we can think about these species and their conservation in a more integrated sort of way.” Once these plants are conserved both in their natural habitats and as part of gene and seed banks, the next step is to characterize their potentially useful traits so that plant breeders can advance agronomic goals. Crop wild relatives have evolved under trying circumstances—they were not bred to thrive in fields tended by farmers. It is their very lack of breeding that makes them so valuable as genetic resources for breeders looking for heat, drought, or salt tolerance, among other useful traits. “We need more action to add value to these plants—growing them, trying to figure out how drought tolerant they are, and characterizing them for other important traits of the future” Khoury mentions. These characteristics, ideally, will be logged in databases like the USDA's Genetic Resources Information Network (GRIN Global), making that information accessible to plant breeders as they move forward in crossing wild relatives with their associated domesticated crops. In short, that's the ultimate goal of the conference and the Road Map: to inspire agricultural researchers, botanical gardeners, land managers, and other stakeholders to collaborate in efforts to advance conservation of plant diversity to maintain valuable potential lines of research for plant breeders. The “match” made between individuals and the natural world, fostered by talented matchmakers in public outreach at botanical gardens, will hopefully inspire the next generation of agricultural researchers, plant breeders, and conservationists. Read more articles inspired by and presented at the April 2019 symposium in the November–December 2019 issue of Crop Science: https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/cs/tocs/59/6.