SDBG conducts a wide range of research about food and agricultural plant diversity. The Garden partners with Federal agencies, Tribal communities, nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, and industry partners to help strengthen food and nutrition security as well as environmental sustainability.
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Scope of work: Building on a Road Map for Conservation, Use, and Public Engagement around Crop Wild Relatives and Wild Utilized Plants of North America, a broad network of botanic gardens, public agencies, and other organizations have formed a working group to improve the conservation and use of wild plants native to North America that are related to important fruit and nut tree crops. Through these collaborations, these wild apples, avocados, chestnuts, hazelnuts, pawpaws, pecans, persimmons, pistachios, plums, and walnuts will be better conserved in botanic gardens and public genebanks, and better protected in their natural habitats.
Timeframe: 2020 to present
Key partners and stakeholders: United States Botanic Garden, Botanic Gardens Conservation International-US (BGCI), Missouri Botanical Garden, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, The Morton Arboretum, other members of the North American Fruit and Nut Crop Wild Relative Working Group
Scope of work: Building on a 2022 workshop at Oak Spring Garden Foundation that brought together botanists, conservation scientists, plant breeders, grape and wine professionals, and other grape researchers, SDBG is working to understand the distributions and conservation status of wild grapes (Vitis L.) native to North America. Through collaborative research, this natural heritage of wild grapes will be better conserved in botanic gardens and public genebanks, better protected in their natural habitats, and more available for research and education.
Timeframe: 2022 to present
Key partners and stakeholders: United States Botanic Garden, Colorado State University Geospatial Centroid, United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS), NatureServe, Botanic Gardens Conservation International-US (BGCI), Saint Louis University (SLU), Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Missouri Botanical Garden, other members of the North American Native Grapes Workshop
Scope of work: SDBG is facilitating the formation of a broad network of botanic gardens, agricultural genebanks, academic institutions, and other organizations around the shared goal to improve the conservation and use of crops and its wild relatives. Through these collaborations, the diversity within the plants that nourish humanity will be better conserved and available for use in plant breeding.
Timeframe: 2023 to present
Key partners and stakeholders: United States Botanic Garden, Gothenburg Botanical Garden, Botanic Gardens Conservation International-US (BGCI), New York Botanical Garden, Crop Trust, Missouri Botanical Garden, The Morton Arboretum, other members of the emerging Global Conservation Consortium for agricultural plant diversity.
Scope of work: SDBG is collaborating with the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS), and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to investigate the potential to increase the resilience of the cranberry crop. Varieties with parentage both from cultivated cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon) and a wild related species (Vaccinium oxycoccos) are being tested for their responses to high temperatures, enabling a better understanding of the genetic basis behind climate resilience.
Timeframe: 2023 to present
Funding source(s): United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS)
Key partners and stakeholders: Salk Institute for Biological Studies, United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS)
Scope of work: Loss of crop diversity, also called crop “genetic erosion”, is considered a threat to global food security. SDBG is collaborating with international research centers and academic institutions to better understand the degree of historical as well as projected future change (including losses) in crop diversity in geographic centers of origin around the world. The research team is documenting this change over time for crops such as potato in the highlands of Peru, where the tuber has been cultivated for over 7000 years, by way of case-study comparisons between historical baseline information collected by scientists over the past century and current observed diversity in farmer’s fields.
Timeframe: 2019 to present
Funding source(s): United States Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA)
Key partners and stakeholders: International Potato Center (CIP), Saint Louis University (SLU), Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS), University of Arizona
Scope of work: SDBG is partnering with the US Forest Service (USFS) to help document the wild relatives of food crops that occur on USFS lands in the United States. These native plants are the wild cousins of crops that are consumed daily by millions of people, and their ‘wild’ traits – including resistance to many pests and diseases, and tolerance to heat, cold, and other stresses – can be introduced through plant breeding into their domesticated cousins to increase crop productivity and resilience. SDBG researchers are generating lists of priority native wild relative species for all USFS lands in the country, and ground-truthing this information through field surveys in the local Cleveland National Forest. Herbarium vouchers and seed from wild relatives on Cleveland National Forest are being collected and conserved in SDBG’s seedbank and gardens, and shared with other researchers and conservation organizations, while the information generated about these plants will help inform future habitat restoration efforts.
Timeframe: 2024 to 2029
Funding source(s): US Forest Service (USFS)
Key partners and stakeholders: US Forest Service (USFS), Colorado State University Geospatial Centroid
Scope of work: SDBG is collaborating with a wide range of botanic gardens to strengthen conservation networks dedicated to collaboratively safeguarding plant diversity through the creation of “metacollections”, in which each garden plays a unique and complementary role. This project will enable the ongoing functioning of these Global Conservation Consortia networks. It will also focus on building the capacities of small- and medium-sized gardens to participate in these networks.
Timeframe: 2023 to 2026
Funding source(s): Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), award number MG-252894-OMS-23
Key partners and stakeholders: Atlanta Botanical Garden, The Morton Arboretum, Montgomery Botanical Center, Botanic Gardens Conservation International-US (BGCI), The Botanic Garden of Smith College, Donald Davis Arboretum, Ganna Walska Lotusland Botanic Garden.
Scope of work: As part of the North American Fruit and Nut Crop Wild Relative Working Group, SDBG is collecting wild California black walnut (Juglans californica S. Watson) populations in San Diego County and across Southern California, to help enhance the ex situ representation of this species in botanic gardens and other facilities. SDBG staff are propagating the walnuts to add to the Garden collection as well as to distribute seedlings to partners.
Timeframe: 2022 to 2024
Key partners and stakeholders: United States Botanic Garden, Botanic Gardens Conservation International-US (BGCI), The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS), and other members of the North American Fruit and Nut Crop Wild Relative Working Group
Scope of work: A broad network of botanic gardens and related organizations are collaborating to develop stronger collection management strategies for plant repositories. In this project, the Morton Arboretum is leading an effort to engage SDBG and other partners in research to better integrate genetics and geographic analyses in collections management, reduce excessive duplication of individual plants (i.e. clones of popular species/varieties) within and among gardens, and better understand the extent of un-recognized hybridization among related species within collections.
Timeframe: 2023 to 2025
Funding source(s): Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), award number MG-251613-OMS-22
Key partners and stakeholders: The Morton Arboretum, United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS), UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, US National Arboretum, Michigan State University, Chicago Botanic Garden, Atlanta Botanical Garden, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, Huntsville Botanic Garden, Donald Davis Arboretum
Scope of work: Examining decades of field experiments on cultivated sunflower varieties, SDBG is collaborating with the University of Colorado and the USDA to understand how climate shifts have already affected crop productivity, and how well sunflower crop breeding has succeeded in coping with climate change. The project aims to better understand the genetic basis and environmental drivers of flowering time and other phenological traits in the crop. The results will be used to guide public breeding of sunflower varieties under climate change in the coming decades.
Timeframe: 2023 to 2026
Funding source(s): National Science Foundation (NSF), award number 2308194
Key partners and stakeholders: University of Colorado Boulder, USDA Agricultural Research Service Northern Crop Science Laboratory
Scope of work: Scope of work: The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) is building a global network of collaborators who are working collectively to uncover the biomolecular composition of the world’s edible biodiversity. As a participatory research project, the PTFI aims to encourage nutrition researchers and other food and agricultural professionals worldwide to profile edible biodiversity using standardized, advanced analytical approaches, and centralized data processing tools. SDBG is participating in the PTFI’s design process by helping to select the list of foods targeted for analysis, developing data and analysis standards, and communicating about the PTFI to researchers and to the wider public.
Timeframe: 2021 to present
Funding source(s): Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI), Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Rockefeller Foundation, other donors
Key partners and stakeholders: American Heart Association (AHA), Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Rockefeller Foundation, other participants in the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI)
Scope of work: Over the past 20 years, conservation and research organizations, facilitated by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, have developed Global Conservation Strategies for the diversity of many different crops. These strategies aim to assess the current status of the conservation and use of crop diversity, and to outline ways to improve this status. While the strategies contain valuable information, they are expensive and time consuming to produce, and their recommendations have not been implemented as extensively as hoped. SDBG is collaborating with the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) to analyze and propose ways to make the strategy production process more effective and efficient, as well as to improve the implementation of their recommendations. The garden is also working with the Crop Trust to deliver updated metrics regarding the current status of the conservation and use of crop diversity for several existing Strategies.
Timeframe: 2022 to present
Funding source(s): German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL)
Key partners and stakeholders: Crop Trust, Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
Scope of work: As part of the North American Fruit and Nut Crop Wild Relative Working Group, SDBG is collecting rare endemic wild desert plum (Prunus eremophila Prigge) in the Mojave Desert, and sand almond (Prunus fasciculata (Torr.) A. Gray var. punctata Jeps.) in the central California coast, and Catalina cherry (Prunus ilicifolia (Nutt. ex Hook. & Arn.) D. Dietr. var. occidentalis Brandegee) on Santa Cruz Island, to help enhance the ex situ representation of these species in botanic gardens and other repositories. SDBG staff are propagating the species to add to the Garden collection and to distribute seedlings to partners.
Timeframe: 2023 to present
Key partners and stakeholders: United States Botanic Garden, Botanic Gardens Conservation International-US (BGCI), United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS), other members of the North American Fruit and Nut Crop Wild Relative Working Group
Scope of work: SDBG is partnering with four other major botanic organizations to form the Rare Plant Research and Mentoring for Postbaccalaureates in Biological Sciences (Rare Plant RaMP) Network. This group aims to address an urgent need to broaden participation in the STEM fields to include historically marginalized groups. Rare Plant RaMP mentees are working with SDBG and our partners to develop and execute independent year-long research projects that address pressing needs in rare plant science and conservation while simultaneously encouraging and empowering professional growth and retention, improving science communication skills and experience, building a lasting network of professional peers and collaborators, and building diverse, equitable, and inclusive mentor-mentee relationships.
Timeframe: 2022 to 2026
Funding source(s): National Science Foundation (NSF), award number 2216650
Key partners and stakeholders: Atlanta Botanical Garden, California Botanic Garden, The Morton Arboretum, Salk Institute
Scope of work: SDBG is honored to partner with the Santa Catarina Pa Ipai community, Terra Peninsular, Expediciones Botánicas, SUVA Research, and other colleagues to nurture community wellbeing, preserve cultural knowledge, and conserve culturally significant plants in their native habitats in the Pa Ipai Indigenous community of Santa Catarina, Baja California Norte, Mexico. The project aims to support the community in establishing more reliable, sustainable sources of native medicine, food, and other plants for community use and for sale.
Timeframe: 2024 to present
Funding source(s): Swift Foundation
Key partners and stakeholders: Santa Catarina Pa Ipai community, Terra Peninsular, Expediciones Botánicas, SUVA Research
Scope of work: SDBG is collaborating to develop a partnership of tribal government, community-based non-profit, academic, and industry groups to support the federally-recognized tribal communities of Jamul and Viejas Bands of Kumeyaay and Pala Band of Mission Indians in San Diego County in their adaptation and resilience to climate change, drought, and wildfire, especially pertaining to plants of cultural significance, tribal health, and wellbeing. The partnership will build capacity for habitat restoration projects, evaluate how culturally important plants are faring due to environmental change, and develop seedbanks, gardens, and greenhouses in tribal communities to care for and propagate culturally significant plants.
Timeframe: 2024 to 2027
Funding source(s): Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program, U.S. Forest Service
Key partners and stakeholders: Jamul Indian Village of California, Pala Band of Mission Indians, Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians, Coastal Roots Farm, Flower Hill Institute, Cota Holdings, Tree of Life Nursery, California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), San Diego State University (SDSU), University of California Cooperative Extension, U.S. Forest Service
Scope of work: SDBG is collaborating with the Salk Institute to examine the genomes of interesting plants in the Garden, conduct joint research, and contribute to related educational activities. Through this work, the cork oak (Quercus suber L.) genome was sequenced for the first time. Cork oak is particularly good at capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it as a substance called suberin. Suberin is highly unlikely to break down under most circumstances, so the suberin in cork roots is able to sequester CO2 underground for a very long time. Since all plants produce suberin, SDBG and Salk are working to understand how widely-grown crop plants, like corn and soybean, could manufacture more suberin in their roots.
The Garden is also working with Salk to sequence species of the ocotillo genus (Fouquieria Kunth). These plants have fascinating adaptations to desert life, including unique regulation of photosynthesis, and this research will contribute to understanding how photosynthesis is optimized in the driest climates. SDBG has an ongoing partnership with the Salk Institute to share plant tissue of many other species for further genomic study. Genera of interest include Adansonia, Ephedra, Manihot, Melaleuca, Quercus, and Tillandsia.
In March 2020, Salk and SDBG co-hosted a two-day Carbon Plant Drawdown Symposium, where scientific leaders from around the world gathered to present cutting-edge, plant-based innovations that use photosynthesis to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
Timeframe: 2019 to present
Funding source(s): Funders of the Harnessing Plants Initiative
Key partners and stakeholders: Salk Institute
Scope of Work: SDBG collaborated with the World Vegetable Center and the Global Crop Diversity Trust (Crop Trust) to develop a global conservation strategy for the diversity of chile pepper and sweet pepper (Capsicum L.) crops, including their many varieties and their wild relative species. The strategy begins by providing summary background information on Capsicum crops. It then documents the current status of conservation and use of Capsicum diversity, based on published literature and online databases as well as community surveys and stakeholder meetings. The strategy concludes by outlining the further steps needed to strengthen the conservation and accessibility for use of this diversity. The Capsicum strategy, and other global crop conservation strategies, are available on the Crop Trust Strategies page.
Timeframe: 2022
Funding source(s): German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL)
Key partners and stakeholders: World Vegetable Center, Global Crop Diversity Trust
Scope of work: Information on the use of food and agricultural crops worldwide and on demand for, supply of, and security of crop genetic resources is needed to prioritize international, national, and local conservation and research efforts. Such information is increasingly available but is scattered through many different information systems, databases and scientific literature. This study brings together and makes widely available pertinent information from many of these different sources. The goal is to develop a set of reproducible metrics that provide an evidence base for plant genetic resources communities to prioritize conservation and use activities.
Timeframe: 2019 to 2023
Funding source(s): Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations Flexible Multi-Partner Mechanism, Government of Norway
Key partners and stakeholders: International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, Global Crop Diversity Trust, Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Bard College
Scope of work: Crop landraces, also known as farmers’ traditional, heritage, folk, or heirloom varieties, are important to local agricultural resilience, human nutrition, and cultural needs, and are an essential genetic resource for modern crop breeding. As economic, agricultural, demographic, environmental, and climatic changes have increasingly led to their disappearance from farmers’ fields, efforts have increased to conserve their diversity in seedbanks. The efforts have been substantial, with over three million samples now stored ex situ, but it is widely known that more conservation work remains to be done. SDBG is collaborating with agricultural research organizations to develop and train international and and national partners in a landrace conservation “gap analysis” methodology. By comparing the diversity of landraces thought to still occur in farmers’ fields against the diversity known to be maintained in seedbanks, conservation gaps can be revealed, and then subsequently filled through further collecting.
Timeframe: 2017 to present
Funding source(s): Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), CGIAR Genebank Platform
Key partners and stakeholders: Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), CGIAR
Scope of work: For the past three decades, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has assessessed the global status of the conservation and use of crop diversity, in publications called the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. The third such report is due to be published in 2023, assessing the timeframe of 2012 to 2019. SDBG is partnering with agricultural research organizations to provide an analysis of the global state of distribution of samples of crop diversity from seed banks and other ex situ facilities to plant breeders and other researchers, in contribution to this third report.
Timeframe: 2022 to 2023
Funding source(s): Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations
Key partners and stakeholders: Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)