International Winter Wheat Improvement Program: history, activities, impact and future

Abstract

International Winter Wheat Improvement Program (IWWIP) was established in 1986 between the Government of Turkey and CIMMYT with three main objectives: (1) develop winter/facultative germplasm for Central and West Asia, (2) facilitate global winter wheat germplasm exchange, and (3) training wheat scientists. ICARDA joined the program in 1991 making it a three-way partnership that continues to work effectively. The germplasm developed by IWWIP as well as the winter wheat cultivars and lines received from global cooperators are assembled into international nurseries. These nurseries are offered annually to public and private entities (IWWIP website) and distributed to more than 100 cooperators in all continents. IWWIP impact has primarily been in new winter wheat cultivars combining broad adaptation, high yield potential, drought tolerance and disease resistance. A total of 93 IWWIP cultivars have been released in 11 countries occupying annually an estimated 2.5–3.0 Mha. IWWIP cooperation with researchers in Turkey, Central and West Asia and several US universities has resulted in a number of publications reviewed in this paper. Important IWWIP impacts include national inventories of wheat landraces in Turkey, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, their collection, characterization, evaluation and utilization.

Keywords

biotic and abiotic stresses / breeding / methodology / winter wheat

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Supplementary materials

The online version of this articale at Alexey MORGOUNOV et al. Winter wheat program for global community 9 https://doi.org/10.15302/J-FASE-2019261 contains supplementary material (Table S1).

Acknowledgements

IWWIP is supported by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of the Turkish Republic and CRP WHEAT. Contribution of the following individuals to IWWIP success from its establishment is acknowledged: Engin Kınacı, Hasan Ekiz, Nusret Zencirci, Ahmet Bagcı and Yüksel Kaya (from Turkey), Bent Skovemand, Eugene E. Saari, Burt Curtis, Mohamed Mergoum and Arne Hede (from CIMMYT), and Surendra P. S. Beniwal, Habib Ketata, Moussa Mossad, Sanjaya Rajaram and Miguel Sanches-Garcia (from ICARDA).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Alexey Morgounov, Fatih Ozdemir, Mesut Keser, Beyhan Akin, Thomas Payne, and Hans-Joachim Braun declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article is a review and does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2019. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)