Agrobiodiversity of Vegetable Crops: Aspect, Needs, and Future Perspectives

Agrobiodiversity represents biodiversity of the agro-ecosystems, and it plays a fundamental role in maintaining the resilience of crops. Vegetables are an important commodity with diversity at several levels such as organ consumed, grade of transformation after harvesting, etc. However, the modern cultivars, by decreasing their agrobiodiversity exhibit, reduced resilience to pests and climatic changes and may, in several cases, show lower levels of bioactive compounds. Moreover, agrobiodiversity should not be evaluated per se, but also the underly- ing services beneath it should be carefully taken into account. To overcome such problems, a reappraisal of agrobiodiversity is essential, as it allows the ‘genetic bottleneck’ induced by modern varieties to be expanded and an increased range of vegetable products made available. In this article, after some considerations of the importance of vegetables and their distribution across the world, we discuss how agrobiodiversity has decreased, mainly due to the adoption of modern vari- eties, and suggest some innovative use of ‘novel’ vegetable products with an added value for human health and wellness.