Dryland agriculture faces escalating constraints from water deficit, heat stress and soil salinity, necessitating the harnessing of adaptive diversity beyond modern wheat cultivars. Wild wheat relatives (WWRs) within the Triticeae harbour key dryland-adaptive traits, including deep, plastic root systems, osmotic adjustment, Na+/K+ homeostasis and heat-responsive photosynthesis, all of which are critical for maintaining yield stability under water-limited conditions. This review synthesizes recent advances in pangenomics, genome-wide association studies, speed introgression (genome-scale introgression under speed breeding) and genome editing, which enable more precise mining and deployment of WWR alleles while reducing linkage drag and improving selection efficiency. Importantly, we integrate biological constraints with conservation and policy considerations, highlighting how fragmented ex situ representation, limited phenotyping capacity in dryland regions, and complex access-and-benefit-sharing frameworks under the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Nagoya Protocol, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture constrain the practical utilization of WWR diversity. By identifying underexplored WWR and allied taxa (e.g., Aegilops searsii and Elymus spp.), priority trait categories, and target dryland agroecosystems, this review provides a unified conservation-to-breeding framework that advances beyond previous syntheses and repositions WWR from genetic reservoirs to deployable resources for climate-resilient wheat improvement.

Over the last decade, several studies have shown the importance of trait diversity in natural populations. Theoretical ecological studies are beginning to incorporate trait variations in models but they continue to be largely ignored in the context of ecosystems that exhibit alternative stable states. Here, we begin with a mean-field model of bistable savanna-woodland system and then introduce trait variation in functional and demographic traits of savanna trees and saplings in the model. Our study reveals that higher trait variation reduces the extent of bistability in the system, such that the woodland state is favoured; that is, woodland occurs over a wider range of driver values compared to the grassland state. We find that the shift from one state to another can become less or more drastic, depending on the trait which exhibits variation. Interestingly, we find that even if the overall tree and grass cover remain insensitive to different initial conditions, the steady-state population trait distribution exhibits sensitivity to initial conditions. Our model findings suggest that in dryland ecosystems, and potentially in a broader class of bistable ecosystems, historical contingency has a stronger impact at the population level rather than at the ecosystem level when trait diversity is considered.