Theoretical approaches for spatial sampling of plant species to ensure conservation of adequate amounts of genetic diversity.
Two main approaches are most commonly applied in the curation and acquisition of germplasm collections for non-crop species. However, how well these approaches meet common conservation and restoration goals has not been determined, nor have similar theoretical alternatives been explored at length. Here we elucidate a variety of alternative sampling schemes and explore how well they capture existing genetic diversity based on a handful of empirical genetic data, and limited simulations. Further we create an R package, , which allows for generation of a spatial sampling scheme for species.
The functions used for writing this manuscript are included as an R package for easy and fast implementation of these approaches on existing collections and for designing sampling schema.