Successful ex situ conservation of plant populations requires a high degree of genetic representativeness. However, spatially biased sampling in ex situ conservation efforts may fail to capture all wild genetic clusters for species with range-wide genetic structure. To investigate the extent of spatially biased sampling in living collections and the coverage of wild genetic clusters in plant populations under ex situ conservation worldwide, we combined a global synthesis of ex situ conservation efforts with a case study of an endangered riparian plant species, Myricaria laxiflora. Our analysis of ex situ conservation worldwide revealed that the majority (82.6%) of ex situ populations fail to cover all wild genetic clusters, largely due to spatially biased sampling with low geographic coverage. Our case study of M. laxiflora showed that genetic diversity differed between the ex situ and upstream populations, while it was comparable between ex situ populations and other wild populations. However, current ex situ populations did not cover all wild genetic clusters, as the upstream genetic cluster was previously uncollected. Our study suggests that the failure to cover all wild genetic clusters in ex situ populations is a widespread issue, and ex situ populations with high genetic diversity can also fail to cover all wild genetic clusters. In future ex situ conservation programs, both the importance of high genetic diversity and the high coverage of wild genetic clusters should be prioritized. (c) 2025 Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
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