CONSERVATION GENOMICS
During my Master's program I was fortunate to dive into the field of conservation genomics as an intern with Revive & Restore. There was a lot of technical information that made it time consuming to understand, so I created a non-technical paper telling success stories to help conservationists without a genetics background understand how genomics tools can benefit their own work. I hope this paper will inspire more conservationists to use genomics to ultimately improve species recovery.
ABSTRACT
Genomic tools are powerful, yet severely underused in conservation. In the United States, where sequencing is generally the cheapest and most accessible, only approximately 5% of listed species have a reference genome, an important resource to facilitate genomic studies. This number is much smaller for IUCN listed species. Even for taxa that have been the focus of genomic studies, these data are rarely applied to understand population dynamics and ultimately inform real world management actions. To address this issue, we highlight seven case studies that demonstrate the value of genomics in conservation from a practitioner’s perspective. The purpose of this paper is to make genomics more approachable by demonstrating the conservation impact these tools can make. Rather than starting with the technologies themselves and reviewing the capabilities that they offer, we focus on how they can be applied to conservation management challenges. By prioritizing management needs and then surveying the array of genomic technologies to match strategies that could address those needs, we hope that these case studies will inspire more of the conservation community because they can see their own work in these stories. These success stories were selected based on the relevance of their application to management challenges, and the impressive impact they were able to make for conservation.