Scripts and datasets for the inventory and prioritization of France’s crop wild relatives.

The challenges facing agriculture, particularly in the context of climate change, emphasise the importance of genetic resources. Crop wild relatives (CWR) are wild plants that are closely related to cultivated crops. They have retained a wide genetic diversity in the absence of domestication and have evolved under natural conditions for thousands of years. They are now recognised as a source of essential adaptive genes for crops, and there are several success stories demonstrating that CWR can improve tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses. However, despite their importance for plant breeding, CWR have not received much attention in terms of conservation. Our study aims to inventory and document the diversity of CWR species in metropolitan France, including Corsica. First, we compiled a list of genera corresponding to France’s major crops, then selected all species in these genera from the national digitalised flora. This gave us a checklist of 1,213 CWR taxa (845 species and 368 taxa below species level) for the French national inventory. We then documented the threat status, endemicity and crossability for each taxon to create a prioritisation list for in situ conservation. This identified170 species for which fine-scale population monitoring is required to inform in situ and ex situ conservation measures. This list includes endemic and threatened species. A further 365 species require close monitoring of their populations in order to update their threat status and determine whether they should also be included on the priority list. Here we provide the R scripts and datasets used to compute the inventory of CWR in France.