Talk:Crop wild relative

Talk

Discussion for: Crop wild relative • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Crop wild relative covers the wild relatives of crops in general (how they are ranked, their use in breeding, how they are collected and protected) and which cannabis plants have been named as relatives. The ranking schemes belong to Gene pool. Whether a given stand is wild or feral belongs to Feral and ruderal Cannabis, and the older arguments of de Candolle and Vavilov to Domestication. Reserves and farms belong to In situ conservation.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources

• Maxted and colleagues (2006), Biodiversity and Conservation 15: 2673–2685; Maxted, Magos Brehm and Kell (2013); Engels and Thormann (2020), Plants 9: 968; Vincent and colleagues (2013), Biological Conservation 167: 265–275: the term, the lists, the state of conservation.
• Hajjar and Hodgkin (2007), Euphytica 156: 1–13; Zhang and colleagues (2017), Evolutionary Applications 10: 5–24: use in breeding.
• Castañeda-Álvarez and colleagues (2016), Nature Plants 2: 16022; Khoury and colleagues (2020), PNAS 117: 33351–33357: gaps in conservation.
• McPartland and Small (2020); Small (2015); Welling and colleagues (2016); Ren and colleagues (2021); Zhang and colleagues (2018); Chen and colleagues (2022); Gao and colleagues (2020); Lynch and colleagues (2025); Balant and colleagues (2025): cannabis.
• Sitpayeva and colleagues (2020); Akhalkatsi, Ekhvaia and Asanidze (2012): regional lists.

The words wild, wild-type, wild-growing and feral

The authors do not use these words alike. McPartland and Small use "wild-type" for a set of plant characters, "wild-growing" for where a plant lives and "aboriginal" for plants unaltered by domestication. Ren and colleagues write of "wild-growing feral plants". Zhang and colleagues (2018) write "wild populations". Chen and colleagues write "wild" and in their results "wild (or feral)". They also summarise the ancestral gene pool of Ren and colleagues as "represented by wild plants and landraces", where the abstract of Ren and colleagues says "feral plants and landraces". The article keeps each author's own word.

Characters and status

Chen and colleagues define their wild class by collection from barren fields and a judgement of phenotype. The characters they report for it include small seeds that fall easily, a camouflage covering and dormancy. McPartland and Small report that domesticated plants in Canada returned to a wild-type form within about 50 generations (citing Small 1975), and Small (2015) holds that it is impossible to determine whether unaltered populations survive. None of these papers tests one position against the other.

Whether a feral stand counts

The definition of Maxted and colleagues says "wild plant taxon". GP1b, as Engels and Thormann give it, is the "wild or weedy form of the crop". Neither text says whether a population descended from a crop and now living unmanaged is a crop wild relative.

The Tibetan assembly

The statement of Lynch and colleagues that wild relatives "still exist in remote regions of Asia" rests on what they call "the single available wild Tibetan assembly", the genome of Gao and colleagues from one female plant of the Kyirong Gully. Their abstract says the existence of wild relatives in Asia "is likely". Ren and colleagues say that "all feral plants studied here" are escapes, and they word the extinction of wild progenitors as a suggestion that further sampling could test.

Sampling bias

The warning of Balant and colleagues about sampling bias comes in a passage on why only two of six Basal cannabis samples of Ren and colleagues fell in their East Asian group. They also name missing data and methods as possible causes. The passage does not say whether particular plants are wild.

Regional lists

The table for Georgia is headed as wild relatives of ancient crops and enters Cannabis sativa L. as GP1A and TG1A, the codes the same chapter gives for the cultivated form. The chapter calls the plant "Kenaf". The list for the Kazakh Tien Shan gives the species in one floristic district and states that it goes beyond the genera of cultivated crops, so a place on it is not a statement about gene pools.

Cannabis in the general literature

The reviews by Engels and Thormann and by Zhang and colleagues (2017), and the assessment by Khoury and colleagues, do not discuss cannabis. The resource book of Maxted and colleagues names it in a list of European crop databases. Engels and Thormann say that the 173 crops of the Harlan and de Wet inventory were drawn from the list of Groombridge and Jenkins and from Annex I of the plant treaty, and Annex I does not list Cannabis.

Pictures

The Qonaev and Saratov photographs show plants growing outside fields. Neither can show whether the plants are wild or feral. The picture of Solanum pimpinellifolium was taken in a botanical garden.