In this talk, I'll overview two chapters from my thesis. Both seek to establish model plant systems that can be used to study the genetic basis of adaptation to the environment. The first is a large collaborative project which surveyed the global diversity of the Brachypodium species complex, in an attempt to establish the genetic resources required for genome-wide association studies in this model cereal. The second is a study of the landscape drivers of genomic divergence and diversity in woodland eucalypts. I'll also highlight some of the computational methods I've developed that made these projects possible.