Building evolutionary resilience for conserving biodiversity under climate change

By C. Sgrò, Andrew Lowe, A. Hoffmann. Evolutionary Applications, 2010

803 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Evolution occurs rapidly and is an ongoing process in our environments. Evolutionary principles need to be built into conservation efforts, particularly given the stressful conditions organisms are increasingly likely to experience because of climate change and ongoing habitat fragmentation. The concept of evolutionary resilience is a way of emphasizing evolutionary processes in conservation and landscape planning. From an evolutionary perspective, landscapes need to allow in situ selection and capture high levels of genetic variation essential for responding to the direct and indirect effects of climate change. We summarize ideas that need to be considered in planning for evolutionary resilience and suggest how they might be incorporated into policy and management to ensure that resilience is maintained in the face of environmental degradation.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f88a7b6456cc1cc0156c617de6a71f52e1c2abc3

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Citations in the corpus

Genetic diversity is considered important but interpreted narrowly in country reports to the Convention on Biological Diversity: Current actions and indicators are insufficient (2021, positive): “…reduce negative inbreeding effects in populations (Frankham, 2005), provide wild species with the potential to adapt to environmental change (Sgr ` o et al., 2011; Wernberg et al., 2018; Carroll et al., 2014), support community structure and ecosystem functions, integrity and resilience…”
Assisted migration within species range ignores biotic interactions and lacks evidence (2017, background): “…some experts suggest using seed material coming from other, possible geographically distant sources that match with the climate predicted at the target locality in the foreseeable future (Sgrò et al. 2011) in a method called assisted migration within species range or predictive provenancing.”
Restoring species through reintroductions: strategies for source population selection (2015, background): “In addition, models suggest that an effective size of at least 1,000 can improve the capacity of a population to respond to additional selection pressures, such as global climate change (Willi & Hoffmann 2009; Sgrò et al. 2011).”
Mix and match: regional admixture provenancing strikes a balance among different seed-sourcing strategies for ecological restoration (2018, positive): “Predictive provenancing (Crowe and Parker 2008; Sgrò et al. 2011) recommends the use of genotypes from areas that have similar climates as the one predicted for the target locality, whereas climate-adjusted provenancing (Prober et al.”
Assessing the benefits and risks of translocations in changing environments: a genetic perspective (2011, background): “Circumstances under which translocations might also be considered in the context of evolutionary resilience and climate change can involve situations where there is strong local adaptation (Sgrò et al. 2011).”
Climate-adjusted provenancing: a strategy for climate-resilient ecological restoration (2015, background): “For example, genome-wide scans revealed cryptic variation in the widespread Eucalyptus salubris that overrode potential climate signals relating to an aridity gradient, suggesting a case where uninformed application of climate-adjusted provenancing could be maladaptive (Steane et al., 2015).”
Evolving coral reef conservation with genetic information (2014, background): “Furthermore, observed genetic diversity can provide information about a species’ long-term persistence and may also indicate adaptive potential or evolutionary resilience (stillman 2003, sgro et al. 2011).”
Bridging the conservation genetics gap by identifying barriers to implementation for conservation practitioners (2017, background): “Preserving adaptive potential has also been recognised as important to ensuring longterm persistence, especially in the face of climate change (Harrisson et al., 2014; Sgrò et al., 2011).”
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”
A framework for incorporating evolutionary genomics into biodiversity conservation and management (2015, background): “The aim is generally to restore fragmented and degraded landscapes, thus enhancing the scope, quality and accessibility of key refuge areas for both key species and whole communities [197].”
Integrating ensemble species distribution modelling and statistical phylogeography to inform projections of climate change impacts on species distributions (2013, background): “Including these locations in conservation planning can help build evolutionary resiliency within populations, mediating extinction risks (Sgro et al., 2011).”