A framework for incorporating evolutionary genomics into biodiversity conservation and management

By A. Hoffmann, Philippa C. Griffin, S. Dillon, Renee A. Catullo, R. Rane, M. Byrne, R. Jordan, J. Oakeshott, A. Weeks, L. Joseph and 3 more. Climate Change Responses, 2015

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Evolutionary adaptation drives biodiversity. So far, however, evolutionary thinking has had limited impact on plans to counter the effects of climate change on biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. This is despite habitat fragmentation diminishing the ability of populations to mount evolutionary responses, via reductions in population size, reductions in gene flow and reductions in the heterogeneity of environments that populations occupy. Research on evolutionary adaptation to other challenges has benefitted enormously in recent years from genomic tools, but these have so far only been applied to the climate change issue in a piecemeal manner. Here, we explore how new genomic knowledge might be combined with evolutionary thinking in a decision framework aimed at reducing the long-term impacts of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services. This framework highlights the need to rethink local conservation and management efforts in biodiversity conservation. We take a dynamic view of biodiversity based on the recognition of continuously evolving lineages, and we highlight when and where new genomic approaches are justified. In general, and despite challenges in developing genomic tools for non-model organisms, genomics can help management decide when resources should be redirected to increasing gene flow and hybridisation across climate zones and facilitating in situ evolutionary change in large heterogeneous areas. It can also help inform when conservation priorities need to shift from maintaining genetically distinct populations and species to supporting processes of evolutionary change. We illustrate our argument with particular reference to Australia’s biodiversity.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c5c08a23ef0152946eecab77a48defe98db5366

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Citations in the corpus

Bridging the gap: a genetic assessment framework for population‐level threatened plant conservation prioritization and decision‐making (2016, background): “Recent review studies have proposed that conservation strategies should focus on maintaining or promoting genetic diversity and gene flow in threatened populations to maintain evolutionary potential and allow adaptation to climate change in situ or via migration (Lankau et al., 2011; Sgr o et al., 2”
Landscape Genomics: Understanding Relationships Between Environmental Heterogeneity and Genomic Characteristics of Populations (2017, background): “However, while the gap between conservation practitioners and population geneticists is already an issue for any genetic study, the uptake by conservation managers from even more complex genomic studies is even more challenging (Hoffmann et al. 2015; Shafer et al. 2015).”
Climate change vulnerability assessment of species (2018, background): “As information on the genomics and transcriptomics of many groups of organisms increases, molecular SNP markers are increasingly being used to test for local adaptation across species ranges (Allendorf, 2017; Hoffmann et al., 2015).”
Climate-adjusted provenancing: a strategy for climate-resilient ecological restoration (2015, background): “Combining genomic data with common garden trials provides the opportunity to link genomic regions with functional traits, to help establish a more in depth understanding of adaptive capacity (Hoffmann et al., 2015).”
Hybridization as a conservation management tool (2019, background): “…and coral reef restoration (Breed, Stead, Ottewell, Gardner, & Lowe, 2013; Chan, Peplow, Menéndez, Hoffmann, & Van Oppen, 2018; Hamilton & Miller 2016; Hoffmann et al., 2015; Hoffmann & Sgrò 2011; Jones & Monaco 2009; van Oppen et al., 2017; Vitt, Havens, Kramer, Sollenberger, & Yates, 2010).”