Back to the Wild to Improve Our Crops

This open-access, peer-reviewed book highlights the critical role of crop wild relatives (CWR) in ensuring global food and nutrition security under changing climatic conditions. Bringing together leading experts from across the world, this book provides comprehensive insights into the conservation, characterization, and utilization of CWR for crop improvement. CWRs offer potentially useful traits such as improved resistance/tolerance to major biotic/abiotic stresses for the development of new varieties adapted to future climatic conditions. Despite the potential high value of these CWRs for crop improvement, they have been little used in most crops. The book showcases cutting-edge advances in pre-breeding, wide hybridization, and germplasm utilization across major cereals, legumes, oilseeds, and other crops, while presenting real-world case studies and success stories from global initiatives. It bridges the gap between genebanks and breeding programs, offering practical strategies to harness beneficial traits from wild relatives for developing climate-resilient and nutritious crops. This book is a useful read for university students (graduate and postgraduate), teachers, genebank curators, plant breeders, pre-breeders, crop researchers, agro-industrialists, environmentalists, economists, ecologists, policymakers, and stakeholders in industry and development research programs, donors, and funding agencies, and serves as a valuable resource to unlock the untapped potential of biodiversity and accelerate sustainable agricultural innovation worldwide.