Crop Wild Relatives utilisation and conservation for sustainable agriculture

Project Information

COUSIN

Grant agreement ID: 101135314

DOI

10.3030/101135314

EC signature date 17 November 2023

Start date 1 January 2024

End date 31 December 2028

Funded under

• Food, Bioeconomy Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment

Total cost

€ 5 677 697,50

EU contribution

€ 5 677 697,50

Coordinated by

UNIVERSIDAD REY JUAN CARLOS
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COUSIN (Crop Wild Relatives utilisation and conservation for sustainable agriculture)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Currently 75% of the world’s food is generated from only twelve plant species and since the 1900s, 75% of plant genetic diversity has been lost as farmers worldwide have replaced their diverse set of local varieties and landraces with genetically uniform, high-yielding varieties. An important consequence of the crop domestication is that the current gene pool is relatively narrow for most crops, with little variation for traits related to crop resilience and nutritional value. This modern approach has also reduced the level of biodiversity routinely used by breeding programmes, this narrows the options for crop improvement at a time when there is an increasing demand for stress resilient crops.

Crop diversification and improved varieties are urgently required to support regenerative farming and an agroecological transition towards maintaining and stabilising yields with reduced agrochemical inputs and under increasingly volatile climates. Exploiting positive attributes of Crop Wild Relatives (CWRs) in crop breeding has the potential to make European agriculture more resilient and nutritionally valuable by exploiting a larger genetic pool linked to desirable traits.
Such a transition results in more diverse, sustainable, and nutritious food, in line with the EU Green Deal policy and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s). While introducing genetic material from CWRs offers great potential to enhance these traits, the process has traditionally been slow and labour-intensive. Recent advances in speed breeding, high-throughput phenotyping and genotyping, now make it more feasible to incorporate CWRs into breeding programs. To effectively exploit the potential of CWRs requires programmes such as COUSIN to ensure there is sufficient relevant knowledge about CWRs, their conservation is ensured, and access to both the genetic material and associated data is maintained.

COUSIN is developing a roadmap, guided by the Crop Readiness Levels, to use CWRs in breeding climate-resilient, nutritious crops. It aims to boost agro-biodiversity and show CWRs' value in breeding for resilient and quality traits.

COUSIN will:
• IDENTIFY pathways to use CWRs to strengthen sustainable agriculture.
• RECOGNISE preferred areas for the conservation and monitoring of the priority CWR species in Europe and implement their trans situ conservation.
• DETERMINE stakeholder-demanded characteristics of CWRs.
• IMPLEMENT stakeholder-demanded characteristics of CWRs into breeding activities.
• PROVIDE information about CWRs in an accessible format to stakeholders.
• TRAIN and raise awareness of the value of CWRs for value chain actors and the society.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the first 18 months, the COUSIN project has already made significant contributions to the expected outcomes of the project. Among the results within the first reporting period, we can highlight the creation of an international stakeholder advisory group who has joined the first annual meeting of COUSIN and provided feedback to the initial work conducted in the project. Furthermore, regional stakeholder groups have been created for knowledge exchange. WP2 has created species distribution models of crop wild relatives in Europe in order to now identify hotspots for the conservation of CWRs. Furthermore, work has been initiated for the setup of five genetic reserves, with one reserve already being established. In WP3, multiple CWR accessions of all five flagship crops have been phenotyped and are being genotyped for their characterisation and use in farming and breeding. WP4 already made a number of new crosses between elite cultivars and CWRs for most of the flagship crops with the aim to transfer desirable traits to the crops. In WP5, the Smart-Cousin data platform has been set up and is currently undergoing tests with the first data gathered in the project. WP6 has actively communicated the project results through a webinar, scientific conferences and papers, workshops and field days, apart from a fully operational website and different social media channels. Furthermore, clustering activities with the sister projects FruitDiv and PRO-WILD have been carried out to create synergies and optimise resource use. WP7 has managed the project very smoothly so far, seeing good progress in all work packages and good integration of the work in the consortium through monthly meetings and the two in-person meetings held in month 2 and month 14 of the project.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Expected impacts of the COUSIN project within the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Destination will directly contribute to the EU Biodiversity strategy for 2030. COUSIN’s outcomes will contribute to improving the conservation and exploitation of CWR and implementing the Farm to Fork strategy, the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the sustainable society-driven climate policy under the Green Deal linked to the UN’s SDGs. Our approaches deliver impacts at the scientific, economic and societal level. These expected impacts include:

• Direct drivers of biodiversity decline will be understood and addressed.
• Protected areas and their networks will be planned, managed, expanded, and the status of species and habitats will be improved based on up-to-date knowledge and solutions.
• Biodiversity, ecosystem services and natural capital will be mainstreamed in the society and economy: e.g. they will be integrated into public and business decision-making; approaches for enabling transformative changes to tackle societal challenges will be built including by deploying nature-based solutions.
• Practices in agriculture, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture will be developed and improved to support and make sustainable the use of biodiversity and a wide range of ecosystems services.
• Biodiversity research and support policies and processes will be interconnected at EU and global levels, making use of advanced digital technologies and societal engagement where appropriate.
• Improved stress resilience for 5 target crops through introgression.
• Superior nutritional and agronomic traits introgressed for 5 crops leading to greater food security.

cousin-readiness-levels.png