Collaborating to Conserve North America’s Crop Wild Relatives and Wild Utilized Plants
Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver, Colorado September 17-19, 2024
North America is rich in wild species related to agricultural and horticultural crops and is home to a diversity of wild utilized plants. Crop wild relatives have valuable characteristics that can be used to sustain food production. As such, they are important genetic resources for crop improvement. Wild utilized plants serve important nutritional and cultural roles, especially to Indigenous communities. Most of these plants are poorly conserved and urgent conservation action is required if they are to be available for future use.
A Road Map was published in 2019 for the conservation, use, and public engagement around North American crop wild relatives and wild utilized plants. This meeting brings together people from botanic gardens, genebanks, Indigenous communities, managed lands, and research and breeding sites to review progress and envision future priorities to conserve crop wild relatives and wild utilized plants.
This meeting is made possible through a partnership between Botanic Gardens Conservation International-US and the United States Botanic Garden.
The registration deadline is August 31, 2024. Space is limited, so be sure to register early! Due to limited site capacity, and to maximize the number of institutions or affiliations represented at the symposium, we suggest limiting attendance to 3 or fewer people from a single institution/unit. Registration is $150.
New Optional Wildland Gathering Day!
A Wildland Gathering to celebrate Indigenous wild plant foraging will be convened by the Flower Hill Institute on Sept. 16. The Wildland Gathering will include Tribal representatives from across North America and facilitated discussions will focus on North American Indigenous foragers and gatherers of wildland plants. Learn more.
New! Live Stream Option
There is now an option to attend the symposium virtually. Learn more.
Keynote Speaker
Gary Nabhan, Author and Ethnobotanist
“Reverse Engineering Western Agriculture with Crop Wild Relatives Breeding and Direct Use"
Gary Nabhan is an "extinguished professor" now focused on building an alliance to bioculturally recover sacred and ceremonial plants -some of them crop wild relatives--that have been endangered or culturally appropriated in recent years. He is a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" award, two Vavilov Medals for biodiversity conservation, a James Beard award nomination, and other honors from the Crop Science Society of America, the Society of Ethnobiology, the Society for Ethnobotany, and the Society for Conservation Biology. He is author or co-author of over 30 books and 120 peer-reviewed articles in journals including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Conservation Biology, Conservation Genetics, Horticulture and Ecology of Food and Nutrition. He lives in Patagonia Arizona where he grows a "tortured orchard" of 100 tree crops and 50 agave species, and in coastal Sonora, where he assists Indigenous fishing communities in restoring mangroves and seagrasses as a buffer against sea level rise.
Collaborators
This meeting is made possible through a partnership between Botanic Gardens Conservation International-US and the United States Botanic Garden, in collaboration with an advisory committee from Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Denver Botanic Gardens, Missouri Botanical Garden, NatureServe, San Diego Botanic Garden, United States Department of Agriculture - Agricultural Research Service, and the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden.