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Nepal's forest cover nearly doubled over the last three decades. While Community Forest (CF) management and agricultural abandonment are primary drivers of forest cover expansion, the contribution of afforestation on privately managed land is not well documented. We mapped forest cover change from 1988 through 2016 in 40 privately managed sites that transitioned from agriculture to forest and assessed how agricultural abandonment influenced private land management and afforestation. We used a mixed method analysis to integrate our 29-year Landsat satellite image-based record of annual forest cover with interview data on historical land cover and land use dynamics from 65 land managers in Bagmati Province. We find that privately managed land accounted for 37% of local forest cover gain, with mean forest area within private forests growing from 9% to 59%. Land managers identified two factors driving these gains on private land: implementation of CF management in adjacent government forests and out-migration. These previously undocumented linkages between forest cover gain on private land and CF management merits further research in community forests and calls for greater policy and technical support for small-scale timber growers and rural households who rely on private forests for income generation. • 29-year remote sensing analysis links forest change to migration & community Forestry. • CF management inspired farmers to grow forest resources on their private land. • Out-migration induced agricultural abandonment was followed by smallholder forestry. • Land managers actively shifted land use in response to community forestry & migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Agricultural practices need to be integrated in community forestry interventions. [•] Site-specific interventions should take into account contexts and community interests. [•] Community-generated lists of priorities can be used to design project interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of crop wild relatives (CWR) genes to improve crop performance is well established with important examples dating back more than 60 years. In this paper, we review available information on the presence of genes from CWR in released cultivars of 16 mandate crops of the CGIAR institutes, and some selected additional crops, focusing on the past 20 years—the period since a comprehensive review by Robert and Christine Prescott-Allen in 1986. It appears that there has been a steady increase in the rate of release of cultivars containing genes from CWR. While there continues to be a strong emphasis on using pest and disease resistance genes, a wider range of characteristics are being introduced than in the past. Those crops whose wild relatives have traditionally been used as sources of useful traits (e.g., wheat, tomato) continue to be most likely to include new genes from their wild relatives. CWR are continually gaining in importance and prevalence, but, we argue, their contributions to the development of new cultivars remain less than might have been expected given improved procedures for intercrossing species from different gene pools, advances in molecular methods for managing backcrossing programes, increased numbers of wild species accessions in gene banks, and the substantial literature on beneficial traits associated with wild relatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]