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Background: The endangered rate of medicinal plant exceeds that of endangered plant species. However, blindly introducing medicinal plants in regions without comprehensively considering the involved environmental factors results in diseases and insect pests and the consequent overproof pesticide residue as well as reduces the quality of herbal medicine produced. Methods: Global Medicinal Plant Geographic Information System (GMPGIS) was developed to analyze environmental information of ecologically suitable regions, thus guiding the conservation and introduction of medicinal plants. This system is based on theories and methods from multiple disciplines, including computer science, geoinformatics, ecology, and traditional herbal medicine. Using a range-based method, the previously established ecologically suitable regions were evaluated. This new method effectively resolved the problem of outlier points, and its functions were implemented in Python. The system automatically calculates the Euclidean distance of climatic factors and intersection of soil factors, thus identifying regions with high ecological similarity and those are climatically and edaphically suitable for the cultivation of medicinal plants. Results: These results, validated using real-world regions, revealed that GMPGIS is highly accurate in screening ecologically suitable regions for the cultivation of medicinal plants worldwide. Conclusions: Overall, because of these features, the GMPGIS is considered as a suitable distribution analysis system for global medicinal plant cultivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Diosgenin, mainly extracted from wild diosgenin-contained Dioscorea species, is a well-known starting material of steroidal and contraceptive drugs. However, due to large market demand and increasingly ecological damage, wild Dioscorea species resources available have been gradually declining. Therefore, identification of new potential ecological distribution of diosgenin-contained Dioscorea species is necessary for diosgenin production. Methods: In this study, a large occurrence dataset (1808 data points) of diosgenin-contained Dioscorea species was obtained from Eastern Asia, Southern North America and Southern Africa. Along with the data for six critical environmental parameters and one soil factor, Geographic Information System for Global Medicinal Plant was applied to predict the potential suitable distribution of Dioscorea species. Results: The results showed that the potential distribution of these Dioscorea species covered a wide field, and that new ecological suitability areas were mainly distributed in the central region of South America, the southern part of the European and coastal region of Oceania. Jackknife test indicated that annual precipitation and annual mean radiation were the important climatic factors controlling the distribution of Dioscorea species. Conclusions: The suitable areas and critical climatic factors will serve as a useful guide for diosgenin-contained Dioscorea species conservation and cultivation in ecological suitable areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]