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The aims of this study were to determine the geographical range and habitats of the Verbascum species in the Arabian Peninsula and to assess their conservation status at national, regional, and global levels by using the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List categories and criteria. Verbascum is represented by 16 species with four varieties in the area of the study, and most of these species are endemic to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This study is based on an ecogeographic survey, which was conducted using herbaria collections, literature sources, and fieldwork. The findings showed that the genus is distributed in three main regions in the Arabian Peninsula, which include northern Saudi Arabia, the Asir and Yemen highlands, and the Hajar mountains in Oman and the UAE. In addition, most species of Verbascum in the region are at high risk of extinction. Nine taxa are threatened, four of which are assessed as Critically Endangered, four as Endangered, and one as Vulnerable. Furthermore, four species are assessed as Near Threatened, while another five species are assessed as of Least Concern. Threats to the Verbascum species in the region are overgrazing, suburban and agricultural expansion, climate change, invasive species, recreational activities, tourism, war, and civil unrest, leading to human intrusion and disturbances. Some important strategies for conserving and managing Verbascum species on the Arabian Peninsula are recommended here.

Crop breeders are currently facing the need to continue increasing crop production to feed the growing human population, while mitigating the negative impacts of climate change on agriculture. Taxonomic and genetic diversity, which includes taxa, genes and alleles that offer novel sources of resistance to pests, disease and abiotic factors that affect crop quality and quantity, are a key tool for crop breeders to address these challenges. Lack of access to this diversity is currently limiting crop improvement. This paper focuses on how the breeder's requirement for greater diversity may be met despite the continue challenges of growing human population, and the impacts of climate change. It is argued that gene pool diversity is largely concentrated in crop wild relatives (CWR) and their more active conservation, especially focusing on in situ conservation applications, will enable the breeding challenges to be met. Further, that the science of in situ conservation is only now coming of age but is sufficiently advanced to facilitate the establishment of integrated national, regional, and global in situ CWR conservation networks. For humankind to substantially benefit from the additional adaptive diversity made available through these collaborative networks for CWR in situ conservation for the first time, breeders need to be provided with the critical resources necessary to address the negative impacts of climate changes on food production—therefore promoting greater global food security.

Over the past decade, plant DNA barcoding has emerged as a scientific breakthrough and is often used to help with species identification or as a taxonomical tool. DNA barcoding is very important in medicinal plant use, not only for identification purposes but also for the authentication of medicinal products. Here, a total of 61 Indonesian medicinal plant species from 30 families and a pair of ITS2, matK, rbcL, and trnL primers were used for a DNA barcoding study consisting of molecular and sequence analyses. This study aimed to analyze how the four identified DNA barcoding regions (ITS2, matK, rbcL, and trnL) aid identification and conservation and to investigate their effectiveness for DNA barcoding for the studied species. This study resulted in 212 DNA barcoding sequences and identified new ones for the studied medicinal plant species. Though there is no ideal or perfect region for DNA barcoding of the target species, we recommend matK as the main region for Indonesian medicinal plant identification, with ITS2 and rbcL as alternative or complementary regions. These findings will be useful for forensic studies that support the conservation of medicinal plants and their national and global use.

Humans require resilient, rapidly renewable and sustainable supplies of food and many other plant-derived supplies. However, the combined effects of climate change and population growth compromise the provision of these supplies particularly in respect to global food security. Crop wild relatives (CWR) contain higher genetic diversity than crops and harbour traits that can improve crop resilience and yield through plant breeding. However, in common with most countries, CWR are poorly conserved in England. There is currently no provision for long-term CWR conservation in situ, and comprehensive ex situ collection and storage of CWR is also lacking. However, there is a commitment to achieve their conservation in England's Biodiversity Strategy and the UK has international commitments to do so as part of the Global Plant Conservation Strategy. Here, we identify a series of measures that could enhance the conservation of English CWR, thereby supporting the achievement of these national and international objectives. We provide an inventory of 148 priority English CWR, highlight hotspots of CWR diversity in sites including The Lizard Peninsula, the Dorset coast and Cambridgeshire and suggest appropriate sites for the establishment of a complementary network of genetic reserves. We also identify individual in situ and ex situ priorities for each English CWR. Based on these analyses, we make recommendations whose implementation could provide effective, long-term conservation of English CWR whilst facilitating their use in crop improvement.

Crop landraces (LR), the traditional varieties of crops that have been maintained for millennia by repeated cycles of planting, harvesting, and selection, are genetically diverse compared to more modern varieties and provide one of the key components for crop improvement due to the ease of trait transfer within the crop species. However, LR diversity is increasingly threatened with genetic erosion and extinction by replacement with improved cultivars, lack of incentives for farmers to maintain traditional agricultural systems, and rising threats from climate change. Their active conservation is necessary to maintain this critical resource. However, as there are hundreds of thousands of LR and millions of LR populations for crops globally, active conservation is complex and resource-intensive. To assist in implementation, it is useful to be able to prioritise LR for conservation action and an obvious means of prioritisation is based on relative threat assessment. There have been several attempts to propose LR threat assessment methods, but none thus far has been widely accepted or applied. The aim of this paper is to present a novel, practical, standardised, and objective methodology for LR threat assessment derived from the widely applied IUCN Red Listing for wild species, involving the collation of time series information for LR population range, LR population trend, market, and farmer characteristics and LR context information. The collated information is compared to a set of threat criteria and an appropriate threat category is assigned to the LR when a threshold level is reached. The proposed methodology can be applied at national, regional, or global levels and any crop group.

Medicinal plant species are crucial biological resources, and yet their conservation in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remains insufficiently studied. This study conducts a comprehensive gap analysis of 74 priority medicinal plant species in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to assess their spatial distribution, identify conservation gaps and propose strategic recommendations. Occurrence records were collected from field surveys and global biodiversity databases, followed by ecogeographical land characterization and conservation gap analyses using the CAPFITOGEN3 tools. The results reveal significant disparities in in situ and ex situ conservation efforts, with two biodiversity hotspots, Asir and Jazan, containing the highest species diversity. While 66 species occur within protected areas, seven species are currently only recorded outside protected areas, indicating opportunities for expanding conservation efforts. Complementarity analysis identified 13 optimal protected areas for priority medicinal plants’ conservation, alongside 20 potential sites outside protected areas that could serve as other effective area-based conservation measures. Ex situ conservation remains critically limited for many species, with only 10 represented in genebanks and all accessions currently stored internationally, although some medicinal plant species may have broader global distributions. To bring about improved outcomes of conservation, the expansion of in situ conservation coverage, integration of other effective area-based conservation measures, strengthening of national genebanks and leverage of biotechnology and geospatial tools is recommended by this study. The findings of this study can be used to develop a more systematic and sustainable approach to the conservation of medicinal plants in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Issue Title: Themed Issue: Human Exploitation and Biodiversity Conservation Crop wild relatives are an important socio-economic resource that is currently being eroded or even extinguished through careless human activities. If the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD 2010 Biodiversity Target of achieving a significant reduction in the current rate of loss is to be achieved, we must first define what crop wild relatives are and how their conservation might be prioritised. A definition of a crop wild relative is proposed and illustrated in the light of previous Gene Pool concept theory. Where crossing and genetic diversity information is unavailable, the Taxon Group concept is introduced to assist recognition of the degree of crop wild relative relatedness by using the existing taxonomic hierarchy.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Crop wild relatives have a long history of use in potato breeding, particularly for pest and disease resistance, and are expected to be increasingly used in the search for tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses. Their current and future use in crop improvement depends on their availability in ex situ germplasm collections. As these plants are impacted in the wild by habitat destruction and climate change, actions to ensure their conservation ex situ become ever more urgent. We analyzed the state of ex situ conservation of 73 of the closest wild relatives of potato (Solanum section Petota) with the aim of establishing priorities for further collecting to fill important gaps in germplasm collections. A total of 32 species (43.8%), were assigned high priority for further collecting due to severe gaps in their ex situ collections. Such gaps are most pronounced in the geographic center of diversity of the wild relatives in Peru. A total of 20 and 18 species were assessed as medium and low priority for further collecting, respectively, with only three species determined to be sufficiently represented currently. Priorities for further collecting include: (i) species completely lacking representation in germplasm collections; (ii) other high priority taxa, with geographic emphasis on the center of species diversity; (iii) medium priority species. Such collecting efforts combined with further emphasis on improving ex situ conservation technologies and methods, performing genotypic and phenotypic characterization of wild relative diversity, monitoring wild populations in situ, and making conserved wild relatives and their associated data accessible to the global research community, represent key steps in ensuring the long-term availability of the wild genetic resources of this important crop.

The species of the genus Verbascum L. in the Arabian Peninsula are revised. Seventeen species are recognized, a key to the species is provided, and all names are typified. Detailed morphological descriptions, distribution maps, habitat information, and field images are presented for each species. Verbascum sarawaticum A. Alzahrani is newly described, and Verbascum eremobium Murb. is newly confirmed for the flora of the Arabian Peninsula. Seven new synonyms are established in this study. Accordingly, Verbascum sheilae Hemaid is treated as a variety under V. deserticola (Murb.) Huber-Morath (as var. sheilae); Verbascum tabukum Hemaid is placed in synonymy with V. eremobium Murb.; Verbascum luntii Baker is placed in synonymy with V. longibracteatum Defl.; Verbascum hema-figranum Hemaid is placed in synonymy with V. medinecum Hemaid; Verbascum abyadicum Hemaid is placed in synonymy with V. shiqricum Hemaid; and both Verbascum chaudharyanum Hemaid and Verbascum asiricum Hemaid are treated as varieties under V. yemense Defl. (as var. yemense and var. asiricum, respectively). Furthermore, the previously segregated genus Rhabdotosperma Hartl is here reduced to synonymy under Verbascum L., and the species formerly known as Rhabdotosperma saudiarabicum A. Alzahrani is formally recombined as Verbascum saudiarabicum (A. Alzahrani) A. Alzahrani.

Crop wild relatives (CWR) are important sources of adaptive diversity for plant breeding programmes. This paper aims to investigate the extent to which the centres of crop origin/diversity are congruent with areas of high CWR diversity. We established the predicted potential CWR distributions for 1,425 CWR species related to 167 crops using 334,527 known distribution locations and generated a global CWR hotspot map. This was then compared to the centres of origin/diversity proposed by Vavilov (amended by Hawkes); Zeven and Zhukovsky’s mega gene centres, Harlan’s centres and non-centres of crop domestication; and crop domestication areas identified using current archaeological evidence proposed by Purugganan and Fuller. Greatest congruence between the global CWR hotspots and other concepts was found with the concept proposed by Vavilov and amended by Hawkes, but there remained significant differences between the CWR hotspots and Vavilov’s concept. This paper concludes that all four centre concepts reviewed have some overlap with CWR diversity but that Vavilov’s original concept has the closest geographic coincidence with CWR hotspots. With the benefit of significant additional global datasets to those used by Vavilov, we were able to suggest amendments to his concept, adding further centres based on CWR hotspots in west and east USA, West Africa, South-east Brazil and Australia. As a result of this study more precise targeting of CWR and crop landrace can be implemented in future, aiding global food and nutritional security.