Prescriptive Evolution to Conserve and Manage Biodiversity

By T. Smith, M. Kinnison, S. Strauss, Trevon L. Fuller, Scott P Carroll. 2014

108 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We are witnessing a global, but unplanned, evolutionary experiment with the biodiversity of the planet. Anthropogenic disturbances such as habitat degradation and climate change result in evolutionary mismatch between the environments to which species are adapted and those in which they now exist. The impacts of unmanaged evolution are pervasive, but approaches to address them have received little attention. We review the evolutionary challenges of managing populations in the Anthropocene and introduce the concept of prescriptive evolution, which considers how evolutionary processes may be leveraged to proactively promote wise management. We advocate the planned management of evolutionary processes and explore the advantages of evolutionary interventions to preserve and sustain biodiversity. We show how an evolutionary perspective to conserving biodiversity is fundamental to effective management. Finally, we advocate building frameworks for decision-making, monitoring, and implementation at the boundary b...

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/345059ea1826939d273c97c88aa16bbd43e61433

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

1. J. Ballou
2. R. Frankham
3. R. Lacy
4. Erle C. Ellis
5. D. H. Reed

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. R. Frankham
2. C. Fenster
3. R. Lacy
4. Erle C. Ellis
5. S. Martén-Rodríguez
6. M. Rosenberg

In Genetics

1. R. Frankham
2. R. Lacy
3. J. Ballou
4. C. Fenster
5. K. Ralls
6. P. Sunnucks
7. Mark Eldridge
8. Michele R. Dudash

Citations in the corpus

• Ecology in an anthropogenic biosphere (2015, background): “…demands for rewilding, conservation beyond protected areas, and other unconventional, controversial, and poorly understood strategies for restoring and sustaining nonhuman nature (Hobbs et al. 2011, 2014, Redford et al. 2013, Robbins and Moore 2013, Marris 2014, Sandler 2014, Smith et al. 2014).”
• Call for a Paradigm Shift in the Genetic Management of Fragmented Populations (2018, background): “…work is properly cited. suffer from inbreeding depression (loss of fitness due to inbreeding) in the short term, and reduced adaptability to changing environments in the longer term, leading to impaired population growth and elevated extinction risk (Carlson et al. 2014; Smith et al. 2014).”