Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: A Synopsis of Coordinated National Crop Wild Relative Seed Collecting Programs across Five Continents.

The Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change Project set out to improve the diversity, quantity, and accessibility of germplasm collections of crop wild relatives (CWR). Between 2013 and 2018, partners in 25 countries, heirs to the globetrotting legacy of Nikolai Vavilov, undertook seed collecting expeditions targeting CWR of 28 crops of global significance for agriculture. Here, we describe the implementation of the 25 national collecting programs and present the key results.

Patterns of Traditional and Modern Uses of Wild Edible Native Plants of Chile: Challenges and Future Perspectives.

Wild Edible Plants (WEPs) still play a vital role in the subsistence of many traditional communities, while they are receiving increasing recognition in tackling food security and nutrition at the international level. This paper reviews the use patterns of native WEPs in Chile and discusses their role as future crops and sources of food products. We conducted an extensive literature review by assessing their taxonomic diversity, life forms, consumption and preparation methods, types of use (traditional and modern), and nutritional properties.

New microsatellites for the Atacama Desert endemic (Fabaceae).

Premise: Algarrobilla (, Fabaceae) is an endemic xerophytic shrub restricted to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Extensive utilization of the region for coal production has endangered this species. Conservation efforts are underway, with genetic diversity analyses being key to the restoration of these populations.

Thermal buffering capacity of the germination phenotype across the environmental envelope of the Cactaceae.

Recruitment from seeds is among the most vulnerable stage for plants as global temperatures change. While germination is the means by which the vast majority of the world's flora regenerate naturally, a framework for accurately predicting which species are at greatest risk of germination failure during environmental perturbation is lacking. Taking a physiological approach, we assess how one family, the Cactaceae, may respond to global temperature change based on the thermal buffering capacity of the germination phenotype.

Soil physicochemical factors as environmental filters for spontaneous plant colonization of abandoned tailing dumps.

Abandoned tailing dumps (ATDs) offer an opportunity to identify the main physicochemical filters that determine colonization of vegetation in solid mine wastes. The current study determined the soil physicochemical factors that explain the compositional variation of pioneer vegetal species on ATDs from surrounding areas in semiarid Mediterranean-climate type ecosystems of north-central Chile (Coquimbo Region). Geobotanical surveys-including physicochemical parameters of substrates (0-20 cm depth), plant richness, and coverage of plant species-were performed on 73 ATDs and surrounding areas.