Thematic Layers of Genomic Susceptibility for Conservation Monitoring.

Population genomics has great potential to inform applied conservation management and associated policy. However, the bioinformatic analyses and interpretation of population genomic datasets can be daunting and difficult to convey to nonspecialists, including on-the-ground conservationists that work with many state, federal and international agencies. We think that individual population genomic metrics of interest can be interpolated and ultimately distilled into thematic GIS layers that represent spatiotemporal genomic potential (or conversely, susceptibility) in conservation monitoring.

Genomic Diversity as a Key Conservation Criterion: Proof-of-Concept From Mammalian Whole-Genome Resequencing Data.

Many international, national, state, and local organizations prioritize the ranking of threatened and endangered species to help direct conservation efforts. For example, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) assesses the Green Status of species and publishes the influential Red List of threatened species. Unfortunately, such conservation yardsticks do not explicitly consider genetic or genomic diversity (GD), even though GD is positively associated with contemporary evolutionary fitness, individual viability, and with future evolutionary potential.

Rapid vertebrate speciation via isolation, bottlenecks, and drift.

Speciation is often driven by selective processes like those associated with viability, mate choice, or local adaptation, and "speciation genes" have been identified in many eukaryotic lineages. In contrast, neutral processes are rarely considered as the primary drivers of speciation, especially over short evolutionary timeframes. Here, we describe a rapid vertebrate speciation event driven primarily by genetic drift.