Agricultural landscape genomics to increase crop resilience

Abstract

Populations are continually adapting to their environment. Knowledge of which populations and individuals harbor unique and agriculturally useful variations has the potential to accelerate crop adaptation to the increasingly challenging environments predicted for the coming century. Landscape genomics, which identifies associations between environmental and genomic variation, provides a means for obtaining this knowledge. However, despite extensive efforts to assemble and characterize ex situ collections of crops and their wild relatives, gaps remain in the genomic and environmental datasets needed to robustly implement this approach. This article outlines the history of landscape genomics, which, to date, has mainly been used in conservation and evolutionary studies, provides an overview of crops and wild relative collections that have the necessary data for implementation and identifies areas where new data generation is needed. We find that 60% of the crops covered by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture lack the data necessary to conduct this kind of analysis, necessitating identification of crops in need of more collections, sequencing, or phenotyping. By highlighting these aspects, we aim to help develop agricultural landscape genomics as a sub-discipline that brings together evolutionary genetics, landscape ecology, and plant breeding, ultimately enhancing the development of resilient and adaptable crops for future environmental challenges.

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