About a quarter of the wild relatives of 79 major vegetables are at risk of dying out

About 24 percent of the wild relatives of 79 major vegetable species are at risk of extinction, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that also assembled a new list of 1,482 vegetable species. The wild cousins matter because they hold traits that breeders draw on when a crop needs to cope with disease, heat or poor soil. Many of them are not stored in any gene bank.

Save more, waste less: The Cool Down’s newsletter sends smart, simple changes that help you and the planet in your everyday life.

Subscribe to The Cool Down →

We may earn a commission if you sign up.

Maarten van Zonneveld led the work. He heads the gene bank at the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru, and was at the World Vegetable Center when the research was done. The team brought together experts in nutrition, agriculture and botany, and the paper is titled “Reversing vegetable biodiversity loss to diversify diets.”

A dataset of 1,482 vegetable species

The researchers compiled what Mongabay describes as a global dataset of 1,482 vegetable species, and they say the true number of local and wild varieties is substantially higher. The data are public on Figshare, where anyone can check how the species were counted. The figure of 1,482 is the size of the catalogue, not a count of species at risk.

ScienceAlert adds that the assessment of the 79 looked at the primary edible parts of each vegetable, and that the authors speak of more than 1,480 vegetable species facing ongoing biodiversity loss. Mongabay’s own report is framed around India’s forgotten vegetables, which it presents as a glimpse of what global diets are missing. The paper’s title makes the same link, tying the loss of vegetable diversity to the question of how varied human diets can be.

The study itself is published under the PNAS paper’s DOI, which the accessible reports cite but which could not be opened for this article. Mongabay dates the PNAS paper to July 2026, so the finding predates this week’s coverage by several months. ScienceAlert describes the authors as an international team of nutrition, agriculture and botany experts.

Where the 24 percent comes from

The quarter figure applies to a narrower group than the whole catalogue. Mongabay reports that about 24 percent of the wild relatives of 79 major vegetables are at risk of extinction. The 79 are the major vegetable species listed in the Food and Agriculture Organization’s The Plants that Feed the World, with legumes excluded, ScienceAlert reports.

ScienceAlert adds a detail about the origin of the number: it cites a review by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization that estimates 24 percent of assessed vegetable wild relatives, counted at the species level, face extinction risk. That wording points to the FAO review as the assessing body and to the word “assessed” as an important limit, since only wild relatives that have been evaluated enter the percentage. Neither report breaks the total into red-list threat categories such as vulnerable or endangered, and neither gives the number of species assessed, so those counts are not stated here.

The phrase at risk of extinction is a classification, not a forecast. It means a species meets criteria for facing a high chance of disappearing in the wild, and it does not mean that a quarter of these plants will vanish on a set date. It also leaves out the three-quarters of assessed relatives that were not placed in that group, as well as any wild relatives that nobody has assessed yet, so the real exposure of the whole group could be higher or lower than the 24 percent figure.

Gene banks and the wild cousins they miss

Van Zonneveld said many vegetable species are not conserved in national or international gene banks. His words, as quoted by Mongabay: “There are so many vegetables that need to be rescued before they completely disappear.” The drivers the study names are rapid land-use change, market homogenization and shifting agricultural priorities.

The gap is documented for individual crops as well. A 2020 story from the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT found that more than 65 percent of wild pumpkins and more than 95 percent of wild chile peppers were absent from any gene bank, drawing on gap analyses by Colin Khoury and colleagues. Those figures describe storage, not extinction risk, and they predate the new study.

That earlier work covered specific crops rather than all 79: wild cucurbits, wild chile peppers, wild lettuce in North America and wild carrots in Tunisia, each the subject of a 2019 paper by Khoury and co-authors. Together with the new dataset, the studies sketch the same pattern from two directions, with few wild relatives stored for the future and a measurable share of them already in danger in the field.

The unanswered question is how the 24 percent splits across threat tiers and across crops. Until the PNAS tables are read in full, that share rests on the FAO review cited by van Zonneveld’s team, and the count of species behind it has not been made public in the reports available. Mongabay and ScienceAlert agree on the 24 percent figure, but only ScienceAlert names its origin, so the attribution to the FAO review rests on a single report.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

Save more, waste less: Subscribe to The Cool Down →

We may earn a commission if you sign up.