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Plants are essential sources of food, medicine, shelter, fuel, feed, and forage, and provide a wide range of additional ecosystem and cultural services to humanity. In recognition of the tremendous value of useful plants and of the increasing threats to their persistence, international agreements including the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture have created ambitious conservation targets which must be measured through quantitative indicators so as to facilitate the development and implementation of strategies aimed at safeguarding their genetic diversity. Gaps in the current list of functioning indicators for these targets suggest that the development of effective measurements of the state of conservation of the genetic diversity within useful plants is a major challenge. Here we present a gap analysis indicator methodology that provides a pragmatic estimate of the comprehensiveness of conservation of the genetic diversity within useful wild plants, both ex situ and in situ. The methodology compares the geographic and ecological variation evident from analyses of the ‘site of collection’ of samples of plant taxa that are safeguarded in genebanks and other living plant repositories, as well as the variation evident in the proportion of species’ ranges inhabiting protected areas, against the full range of geographic and ecological variation in their native distributions. The methodology enables a prioritization of species for immediate conservation action, and, when measured periodically, can quantify progress toward comprehensive conservation of these plants at global, regional, and national scales, including determining when that goal has been reached. Assessing almost 7000 taxa with the “Comprehensiveness of conservation of useful wild plants” indicator, we find that they are currently highly under-conserved, with less than three out of every 100 taxa assessed as sufficiently conserved or of low priority for further conservation action (overall global indicator = 2.78). Indicator results at the national and regional scales as well as by species use type varied, although virtually all countries, regions, and use categories were found to require further conservation action, particularly with regard to ex situ conservation. The results as well as input data and method code are available for indicator reporting and for conservation prioritization setting.

Much biodiversity data is collected worldwide, but it remains challenging to assemble the scattered knowledge for assessing biodiversity status and trends. The concept of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) was introduced to structure biodiversity monitoring globally, and to harmonize and standardize biodiversity data from disparate sources to capture a minimum set of critical variables required to study, report and manage biodiversity change. Here, we assess the challenges of a ‘Big Data’ approach to building global EBV data products across taxa and spatiotemporal scales, focusing on species distribution and abundance. The majority of currently available data on species distributions derives from incidentally reported observations or from surveys where presence-only or presence–absence data are sampled repeatedly with standardized protocols. Most abundance data come from opportunistic population counts or from population time series using standardized protocols (e.g. repeated surveys of the same population from single or multiple sites). Enormous complexity exists in integrating these heterogeneous, multi-source data sets across space, time, taxa and different sampling methods. Integration of such data into global EBV data products requires correcting biases introduced by imperfect detection and varying sampling effort, dealing with different spatial resolution and extents, harmonizing measurement units from different data sources or sampling methods, applying statistical tools and models for spatial inter- or extrapolation, and quantifying sources of uncertainty and errors in data and models. To support the development of EBVs by the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), we identify 11 key workflow steps that will operationalize the process of building EBV data products within and across research infrastructures worldwide. These workflow steps take multiple sequential activities into account, including identification and aggregation of various raw data sources, data quality control, taxonomic name matching and statistical modelling of integrated data. We illustrate these steps with concrete examples from existing citizen science and professional monitoring projects, including eBird, the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring network, the Living Planet Index and the Baltic Sea zooplankton monitoring. The identified workflow steps are applicable to both terrestrial and aquatic systems and a broad range of spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales. They depend on clear, findable and accessible metadata, and we provide an overview of current data and metadata standards. Several challenges remain to be solved for building global EBV data products: (i) developing tools and models for combining heterogeneous, multi-source data sets and filling data gaps in geographic, temporal and taxonomic coverage, (ii) integrating emerging methods and technologies for data collection such as citizen science, sensor networks, DNA-based techniques and satellite remote sensing, (iii) solving major technical issues related to data product structure, data storage, execution of workflows and the production process/cycle as well as approaching technical interoperability among research infrastructures, (iv) allowing semantic interoperability by developing and adopting standards and tools for capturing consistent data and metadata, and (v) ensuring legal interoperability by endorsing open data or data that are free from restrictions on use, modification and sharing. Addressing these challenges is critical for biodiversity research and for assessing progress towards conservation policy targets and sustainable development goals., published version, peerReviewed