Conservation Status and Threat Assessments for North American Crop Wild Relatives

Conservation statusand threat assessmentsevaluate species’ relative risks of extinction globally, regionally, nationally, or locally and estimate the degree to which populations of species are already safeguarded in existing conservationsystems, with the aim of exposing the critical gaps in current conservation. Results of the assessments can therefore aid in directing limited conservationresources to the species and populations that are most at-risk. This chapter introduces the roles of conservation statusand threat assessmentsin informing conservationpriorities for crop wild relativesin North America and provides an overview of the current results for US taxa. Methods to assess the conservation statusand to perform threat assessmentsfor North American crop wild relativesare well developed via NatureServe and the International Union for Conservationof Nature ( IUCN) Red List, and the essential infrastructure to perform these analyses is present, at least in Canada and the US. Current conservationassessments for North American wild relatives need updating but already reveal a landscape of multiple complex threats and major gaps in the ex situ and in situ conservationof prioritized species. Further resources and concerted efforts are needed to update conservationassessments and then to use the results to inform efforts to fill the critical gaps in conservation.