The conservation genetics toolbox
Since the late 1960’s, conservation genetics has grown from a handful of
techniques into a fully-fledged discipline that uses genetic information
to inform the conservation management of threatened species worldwide
(Avise 2008). This field has developed a substantive toolbox applied to
understand phylogenetics and species delimitation (e.g., Yusefi et al.,
2020; Coimbra et al., 2021), population structure and demographics
(e.g., Coimbra et al., 2020), natural community profiling (e.g., Young
et al., 2020), and the level of standing genetic variation within and
among populations (e.g., Zhang, Luan, Ren, Hu, & Yin, 2020). Much
discussion regarding the conservation genetic toolbox has been dedicated
to the types of variants that are used for genetic inference, and for
good reason: in a relatively short time frame, the field has experienced
remarkable growth, from detecting variants using allozyme protein
electrophoresis to detecting hundreds of thousands of variants through
high throughput sequencing (HTS) approaches (Hohenlohe, Funk, & Rajora,
2021). While the field of conservation genetics was founded on managing
putatively neutral diversity as a proxy for evolutionary potential
(Yoder, Poelstra, Tiley, & Williams, 2018), new HTS sequencing and
computational tools make it possible for researchers to elucidate the
genomic basis of functional traits important to adaptation, which has
important implications to understanding how species may respond to a
changing world (Hoelzel, Bruford, & Fleischer, 2019; Mable, 2019).
As HTS continues to advance, there will no doubt be more new and
exciting tools incorporated into conservation genetic inquiry. In
addition to new methods enabled by advances in HTS, there remains one
long-standing tool within the conservation genetics toolbox that is
often overlooked: the pedigree. Pedigrees, or documented ancestry of
individuals in a population, have been recorded by humans for millennia.
These family trees have long provided a proxy for understanding the
transmission of traits from generation to generation, and maintain
diverse applications in agriculture (e.g., Smith, Duvick, Smith, Cooper,
& Feng, 2004), human health (Bennett, 2011), evolutionary biology
(Kruuk & Hill, 2008), and conservation (e.g., Ballou et al., 2010).
Sewall Wright famously advanced the utility of pedigrees through his
contributions towards pedigree-based path analysis, inbreeding, and
kinship estimates (Wright, 1922; Ballou, 1983). Using Mendelian
inheritance, pedigrees provide an estimate of kinship as the probability
of alleles being identical-by-descent (IBD) from a common ancestor
(Lacy, 1995). As the fields of conservation biology and genetics emerged
in the second half of the 20th century, these same principles were used
to estimate kinship, inbreeding, and heritability of functional traits
in threatened populations in an effort to conserve evolutionary
potential.