A global search to gather and save the wild relatives of essential food crops such as wheat, barley and rice is underway. The Global Crop Diversity Trust, based in Rome, Italy, is today launching the 10-year initiative to preserve the genetic resources of these wild plants, which could be vital in helping make food crops more hardy and versatile in the face of climate change.

“All our crops were originally developed from wild species—that’s how farming began,” says Cary Fowler, executive director of the trust, in a statement. “But they were adapted from the plants best suited to the climates of the past. Climate change means we need to go back to the wild to find those relatives of our crops that can thrive in the climates of the future.”

For example, in the 1970’s rice harvests across Asia were devastated after a virus broke out that prevents rice plants from flowering and producing grain. Researchers from the International Rice Research Institute, based in the Philippines, screened tens of thousands of wild and cultivated rice plants for genetic resistance to the disease, and found it in a wild relative.

But the wild relatives of crops have never before been systematically collected and so only make up a few percent of the world’s genebank resources. Fowler says these wild relatives need to be collected before they are lost forever due to changing environments and habitat destruction. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, otherwise known as the doomsday vault, only houses seeds of domesticated crops. But it will become one of a number of sites around the world that will in future conserve samples of wild relatives as a result of the initiative. (Read Nature’s feature on the Svalbard vault here.)

The project, which is being kick-started with US$50 million from Norway, also aims to help researchers and crop breeders to use the genetic resources it collects. It will test whether the wild seeds can be grown and crossed with existing crops without contaminating these breeding lines with undesirable traits that might also be present in the wild relatives.

“Diversity equals resilience in the biological world, which is why this project is vital to the survival of agriculture,” adds Paul Smith, director of the Millennium Seed Bank at the Royal Botanic Gardens, in Kew, and a partner in the project.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research is also involved.