WorldCuP: A database of checklists documenting the World's Cultivated Plants and their distributions

Societal Impact Statement Human life would be unrecognizable without the benefits of cultivated plants, including crops, ornamentals, or plants with other uses. Despite their importance in daily life and prevalence across landscapes, we know surprisingly little about global cultivated plant distributions. To close this gap, we digitized checklists listing vascular plants that were selected, planted, and cared for by people in regions worldwide. We harmonized and compiled this data to form the World Cultivated Plants (WorldCuP) database. The WorldCuP database, which links plant species to the regions in which they are cultivated, enables new research in ecological impacts, conservation, ethnobotany, and biological invasions. Summary People have relied on cultivated plants for thousands of years in order to meet basic needs and to provide diverse sociocultural and environmental services. The ubiquity of cultivated plants in human‐dominated landscapes has important implications for the structure and functioning of communities, ecosystems, and regional species pools. A thorough documentation of the global distributions of cultivated plant species is necessary to stimulate research on the impacts of cultivated plants and to support large‐scale integration of historical and cultural knowledge about cultivated plants. Here, we present the World Cultivated Plants (WorldCuP) database: a publicly available living database of 3050 checklists of cultivated vascular plant taxa in 2718 globally distributed regions spanning 156 countries. The database has accompanying taxonomic information (original and standardized names), geographic data (simple features for each region), and references for original sources. Data were gathered from 597 printed and online sources including regional floras, botanical garden collections, nursery offerings, and surveys of domestic gardens. Although most sources were modern (70.6% published after 2000), historical sources dating from 1375 are included. The WorldCuP database includes 102,243 accepted cultivated plant taxa, including 91,358 species, 6064 subspecies, 4722 varieties, and 99 forms. WorldCuP has nearly global coverage, however, there are notable absences in parts of Africa, southwest and central Asia, and a number of islands. WorldCuP is the most comprehensive collection of cultivated plant species occurrences to date and will be a new resource for regional studies or global analyses of cultivated plants.