Crop wild relatives of the United States
Species distribution modeling and conservation gap analysis for all of the United States crop wild relatives.
- R
- terra
- sf
- targets
The problem
Wild relatives of crops carry genetic diversity that breeders depend on, but their conservation status is poorly documented. The 2020 PNAS assessment established a national baseline; new species needed the same treatment without re-inventing the pipeline.
What was built
A modernized modeling workflow covering occurrence data cleaning, species distribution modeling, and ex situ / in situ gap analysis, structured so that adding a taxon is a configuration change rather than a code change.
Outcome
Reusable methods applied to additional species groups, with a companion repository (cwrSDM) adapting the Aichi Target 13 codebase for ongoing work. The wild grapevine assessment was published in Plants, People, Planet, and the same methodology now underpins GAMMa, a web application bringing gap analysis to botanic garden collections.
Publication
Carver, D., Khoury, C.K., Frances, A., McCarry, N., Diaz-Garcia, L., Galarneau, E., Gora, S., Haidet, M., Heinitz, C., Knapp, W., Meyer, A., Miller, A., Mims, R., Sapkota, S., Spurrier, C., & Wen, J. (2026). Conservation gap analysis for wild grapevines (Vitis L.) of the Americas. Plants, People, Planet.