Significance: This study provides conservation assessments for 600 US native plants that are wild relatives of important agricultural crops. We found that more than one-half of the species may be endangered in their natural habitats, and that the great majority require further conservation action, both ex situ (in gene banks and botanical gardens) and in situ (in protected areas). Diversity hotspots across the nation represent focal regions for further collecting for ex situ conservation as well as for enhanced habitat protection. Wider collaborations, as well as greater awareness, access to, and information about these resources are needed to bolster their conservation and use.

Effective assessments of the current status of biodiversity conservation are needed to support planning, policy and action, from local to global levels. Of particular use would be well documented, reproducible methods based on openly accessible data and tools. Such methods should provide an accurate estimate of the state of conservation of diversity, identifying gaps in current conservation systems, while providing a benchmark against which to measure success, including determining when conservation goals have been met. Here we introduce GapAnalysis, an open source R package developed to support the assessment of the state of conservation of taxa, both ex situ (in genebanks, botanic gardens and other repositories) and in situ (in protected natural areas). The eco‐geographic variation maintained in conservation repositories and that present within protected natural areas is compared with the full extent of eco‐geographic variation predicted within species' native ranges. Eco‐geographic conservation gaps are identified, and taxa are then prioritized for further action. The package enables users to quickly determine conservation status, gaps and priorities for as few as one to as many as thousands of taxa, for any wild flora or fauna for which occurrence data and species distribution models are available. To demonstrate the use of GapAnalysis, we provide case studies for wild plant taxa in the genera Capsicum L. and Cucurbita L, with an accompanying online R tutorial for three of the Cucurbita species.

Societal Impact Statement: Food plants are vital to human and planetary health, but their diversity is threatened, making food security, nutrition, and environmental goals more difficult to achieve. Food plant diversity conservation, research, and education can be enhanced through collaboration between sectors, including genebanks and botanic gardens, which possess complementary strengths but have historically tended to work in isolation. We describe a vision for conserving and promoting food plant diversity through closer cross‐sectoral collaboration, offering examples of recent successes and announcing the launch of the Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants. Summary: Food plant diversity is essential to food security and human nutrition and to productive, resilient, and sustainable food systems. Genebanks and botanic gardens hold large and varied collections of this diversity but have historically tended to work in isolation from each other on conservation, research, and education. We describe a vision for conserving and promoting food plant diversity by leveraging the complementary strengths of these sectors. To catalyze a more integrated global system for the conservation and sustainable use of food plant diversity, essential steps include better understanding and documenting the multiple dimensions of this diversity, conserving it, positioning it for broader use, and raising awareness about it, all of which require greater coordination around information, policies, and actions. We offer examples of recent efforts that have increased collaboration between these sectors and announce the launch of the Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants.

Societal Impact Statement: Wild grapevines ( Vitis L.) native to the Americas are ecologically and culturally important plants that are also critical to the global cultivated grape industry as sources of traits for crop innovation, but many of these species are poorly documented and insufficiently conserved. We provide new information on the distributions, environmental adaptations, and conservation statuses of 38 wild grapevine taxa native to the Americas. Ranging from southern Canada to northern South America, with the greatest concentration of taxa in the southern and central to eastern United States and in central to southern Mexico, these taxa show wide variations in their adaptations to different environmental conditions. The vast majority of taxa are of urgent or high priority for further conservation action. Summary: The wild relatives of cultivated grapevines ( Vitis L.) are ecologically and culturally important plants that provide valuable genetic resources for grape scion and rootstock breeding. The distributions of wild grapevines, local adaptations to environmental conditions of potential interest for crop innovation, and their current degree of representation in conservation systems are insufficiently documented. Here, we compile occurrence records for 38 wild grapevine taxa native to the Americas, predict their distributions at high spatial resolution, use climatic and topographic information to infer their environmental adaptations, and assess their ex situ and in situ conservation representations, including identification of gaps in current conservation. Wild grapevines occur from southeast Canada to southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, with one taxon distributed from Mexico to northern South America as well as the Caribbean and one taxon endemic to Colombia. Taxonomic richness is concentrated in the southern and central to eastern United States and central to southern Mexico, with up to 10 potentially sympatric taxa in central to southern Texas. We find substantial variation among and within Vitis taxa in their adaptations to temperature, precipitation, and topographic characteristics. We categorize 25 of 38 of the taxa as urgent priority and 10 as high priority for improving ex situ conservation representation. Three taxa are assessed as urgent and 29 as high priority for enhancing in situ conservation. Further action, with emphasis on conservation gap hotspots, is needed to more comprehensively conserve wild Vitis native to the Americas.

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate a method to generate your own presence and absence data and distribute those samples using specific ecological characteristics found in remotely sensed imagery. You will see that even when field data is unavailable, you can still digitally sample a landscape and gather information on current or past ecological conditions.

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how to use Google Earth Engine as a means of associating remotely sensed data (weather observations) with open-source GPS point locations. These methods will provide a quick and easy way to access and analyze large amounts of information relative to your own research and efficiently move your data outside Earth Engine.