It\u2019s easy to forget how intensely agriculture depends on wilderness. Farmers of the past domesticated all crops and livestock from wild species, just as humans domesticated dogs from wolves.<\/p>\n
And even today, farmers and plant scientists are constantly looking to wild plants rescue our foods and make farming more sustainable. Examples abound: In the 19th century, a soil-dwelling insect from North America nearly wiped out the wine industry \u2014 destroying the vineyards of England, France, and Germany. Wild grapes from North America, which had developed resistance to this pest, came to the rescue and saved European wines. In the past few years, plant scientists searched out wild potatoes that are able to resist so-called \u201clate blight\u201d \u2014 which turned potato stocks into festering piles of slime, triggering the Irish famine of the 1840s. Now breeders are working those blight-resistant traits into modern potatoes<\/a>, which would keep farmers from depending on fungicides.<\/p>\n As the climate changes, scientists will likely turn to these wild crop relatives more and more frequently to protect farms from droughts, heatwaves, and pests. But at the same time, people are inadvertently bulldozing some of the last remnants of these plants to build strip malls and highway cloverleafs.<\/p>\n In a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/a>, scientists have mapped out the remaining habitat for these critical cousins of our food crops. Some of these habitats are protected, but others are threatened, said Colin Khoury lead author of the paper and researcher at Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture<\/a>. \u201cWe found some of the highest diversity of these wild crop relatives near Washington D.C. Luckily there are preserves out there, but they are not that big.\u201d<\/p>\n As suburbs sprawl, Khoury fears for the prospects of those plants. Some may already be gone, buried under concrete.<\/p>\n Many of these wild crop relatives are dwindling in number: There\u2019s a walnut tree native to the California Bay Area, Juglans hindsii,<\/em> which is incredibly rare in the wild, but widely used in orchards, where growers graft fragile English walnut tops onto pest-resistant hindsii<\/em> roots. There\u2019s an endangered sunflower<\/a> that only grows in a few saline seeps in the desert of New Mexico and Texas. It\u2019s this little sunflower that provided the genes to allow commercial sunflowers to tolerate salty soils.<\/p>\n And sunflower seeds aren\u2019t just for baseball dugouts: \u201cIt\u2019s an incredibly important cooking oil, only second to olive oil in Mediterranean regions and other parts of the world,\u201d Khoury said. \u201cIt\u2019s a really healthy oil with a high burning point, so if you look at tortilla chips which are, to be honest, my favorite food, they are often cooked with sunflower oil.\u201d<\/p>\n Certain wild plants could even become the staples of the future. You can imagine, in an alternate history where Europeans don\u2019t colonize North America, that the world would have had several more common Native American crops. And we might still develop these plants to meet the challenge of feeding a warming world.<\/p>\n Take, for example, the potato bean: Apios americana.<\/em> It\u2019s a vine that can grow 50 feet high, while developing potato-like tubers underground. It\u2019s part of the bean family, which means that it can make its own fertilizer and its tubers are full of nutritious protein. \u201cIt\u2019s like, super incredibly cool,\u201d Khoury said. \u201cIt once grew all the way from St. Louis to Cape Cod as a Native American crop. It was probably part of the first Thanksgiving.\u201d<\/p>\n But the potato bean has almost disappeared. If modern plant breeders began working with this plant, it might solve some of the world\u2019s trickiest problems, providing abundant plant protein while fixing its own nitrogen. The tubers are nutty and delicious, according to Khoury.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the predicament: We will only have a chance to farm these wild plants if we don\u2019t wipe them out. And we still don\u2019t know exactly where they are. The team of scientists working with Khoury used huge piles of data to make their maps \u2014 but some of that data is 10 years old. The next step for Khoury is to go out and verify that these plants are out there \u2014 a massive job.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why the new paper includes a call for help from citizen scientists: Naturalist clubs, plant enthusiasts, or even motivated Grist readers. Khoury imagines efforts run by scientists from seed banks and botanical gardens that could quickly organize these amateur botanists.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are organisms out there that we rely on to survive, and that directly hold up our artificial systems, like agriculture,\u201d Khoury said. \u201cThese plants are potentially ambassadors for a bigger message, which is nature. It\u2019s not only cool, but it\u2019s essential.\u201d<\/p>\n