The expansion of conservation genetics

Key Points Conservation biology is considered to be a 'crisis discipline', and therefore requires an arsenal of approaches and techniques to ensure that educated, rapid decisions about endangered species and threatened areas are made. The expansion of genomic technologies in data acquisition, storage and analysis has assisted in increasing the efficiency of the field of conservation genetics and in helping conservation decision-making. Conservation genetics leads us to a better picture of pattern and process in endangered species, and allows the use of pattern and process in conservation decision-making. The most important applications of conservation genetics in the future will be those that incorporate both pattern and process into a cohesive approach to decision-making. A wide range of unconventional sources for DNA is used in conservation work; this includes faeces, feathers, fur, sloughed-off skin, plants from herbarium sheets and clever direct-biopsy approaches that minimize invasiveness. One approach that will be increasingly important in the expansion of conservation genetics concerns recent efforts to form centralized DNA barcode databases and DNA registries. Conservation genetics itself needs to be placed in the context of the difficulties of working across political boundaries, amidst economic challenges and in the face of the complexity of using science to inform management decisions. The 'crisis discipline' of conservation biology has voraciously incorporated many technologies to speed up and increase the accuracy of conservation decision-making. Genetic approaches to characterizing endangered species or areas that contain endangered species are prime examples of this. Technical advances in areas such as high-throughput sequencing, microsatellite analysis and non-invasive DNA sampling have led to a much-expanded role for genetics in conservation. Such expansion will allow for more precise conservation decisions to be made and, more importantly, will allow conservation genetics to contribute to area- and landscape-based decision-making processes.