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The Andean region harbors a variety of ecological niches including tropical mountains, Pacific coastal and Amazonian humid lowlands, and many intermediate microclimates. These areas contain a great diversity of crops and their wild relatives. Much of this diversity is indigenous and much has been selected by man. This genetic diversity includes food plants and their wild relatives, in addition to medicines, condiments, colorants, and spices. Both great empires and small indigenous groups have used various plants over thousands of years. Unfortunately, many landraces and their wild relatives have disappeared and others are near extinction. Although many collecting expeditions and some research projects have been conducted on these plants, more funding is needed for germplasm collection and conservation. National programs of plant genetic resources have been formed in the Andean countries to preserve and maintain this diversity and develop additional research. Both the Andean countries and the whole world will benefit from the discovery and market development of indigenous food, medicine, and industrial crops. These new agricultural products can be an important economic resource in emerging world markets and international trade.

Solanum series Conicibaccata contains about 40 wild potato (section Petota) species distributed from southern Mexico to central Bolivia. It contains diploids (2n = 2x = 24), tetraploids (2n = 4x = 48) and hexaploids (2n = 6x = 72) and some polyploids are likely allopolyploids. Our morphological phenetic study in an Andean site in central Peru (12°S, 3200 m altitude) is a replicated study from one done in the north central United States (45°N, 180 m elevation) but uses more species (28 vs. 25), accessions (173 vs. 100), and morphological characters (72 vs. 45) and also includes members of related series Piurana. Both US and Peruvian studies provide phenetic support with Canonical Discriminant Analyses (but poorly if at all with Principal Components Analyses) to distinguish the following species or species groups in series Conicibaccata: 1) S. agrimonifolium and S. oxycarpum as a possible single species, and 2) S. longiconicum (tetraploids from Mexico and Central America), 3) the South American Conicibaccata diploids as a possible single species, except for 4) S. trinitense that is distinctive, 5) the South American tetraploids as a group except for 6) S. flahaultii that is distinctive. However, character states among these species or species groups are often present only by using a range of widely overlapping character states (polythetic support). We suspect that our continuing molecular studies will support the synonymy of many of these species.

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