Potential, attainable, and current levels of global crop diversity

Abstract

High levels of crop species diversity are considered beneficial. However, increasing diversity might be difficult because of environmental constraints and the reliance on a few major crops for most food supply. Here we introduce a theoretical framework of hierarchical levels of crop diversity, in which the environmental requirements of crops limit potential diversity, and the demand for agricultural products further constrain attainable crop diversity. We estimated global potential, attainable, and current crop diversity for grid cells of 86 km2. To do so, we first estimated cropland suitability values for each of 171 crops, with spatial distribution models to get estimations of relative suitability and with a crop model to estimate absolute suitability. We then used a crop allocation algorithm to distribute the required crop area to suitable cropland. We show that the attainable crop diversity is lower in temperate and continental areas than in tropical and coastal regions. The diversity gap (the difference between attainable and current crop diversity) is particularly large in most of the Americas and relatively small in parts of Europe and East Asia. By filling these diversity gaps, crop diversity could double on 84% of the world's agricultural land without changing the aggregate amount of global food produced. It follows that while there are important regional differences in attainable diversity, specialization of farms and regions is the main reason for low levels of local crop diversity across the globe, rather than our high reliance on a few crops.