Swedish Crop Wild Relatives: towards a national strategy for in situ conservation of CWR

Abstract

In 2015, the Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland) initiated a project to help strengthen the efforts of conservation and use of crop wild relatives (CWR) across the region. Policy recommendations that were put forward included creating national strategies for each Nordic country and adopting and implementing complementary in situ conservation as the main approach for safeguarding CWR across the region. The present work explores in greater detail the situation for Sweden. Taxa rich areas and areas where potential data bias may be prevalent are located. An eco-geographic map is constructed to help determine how genetic diversity may be portioned across the country within populations of taxa. An in situ complementarity analysis accounting for taxa richness, eco-geographic richness and the protected area network in the country is also presented. Possible reasons for diverging results, as compared to the regional analysis, are discussed. The document serves as a starting point for further in-depth research on CWR distribution, conservation and use within Sweden.

Keywords

• crop wild relatives
• protected areas
• ELC-analysis
• Sweden