Abstract
Conservation biologists have drawn up a range of guidelines for the conservation of genetic diversity—to maximise the chances that populations of threatened species persist, and to conserve this variation for its potential utility. However, our understanding of the effectiveness of conservation guidelines for maintaining genetic diversity in situ is limited. Furthermore, we lack information on how species-level variation in mating system affects these genetic conservation strategies. We used the British geographical ranges of eight widespread but declining plant species, varying in breeding system, as a model to assess the effectiveness of guidelines for the in-situ conservation of neutral genetic diversity. By applying simulated in-situ conservation scenarios to amplified fragment length polymorphism data, we show that the conservation of one population (the “minimum-set” approach) would retain ~70% of common allelic variation, but few or no rare alleles (alleles with frequency≤0.05). Our results indicate that the conservation of >35% of populations would be needed to reach the Convention on Biological Diversity's recommendation to conserve 70% of genetic diversity in situ, as applied to rare alleles (~10 populations within each species' British range). The capture of genetic variation in simulated conservation networks was insensitive to breeding system. However, a spatially stratified approach to population selection led to significantly greater capture rates for common alleles in two of our study species, relative to a spatially random strategy. Our study highlights the challenges of conserving genetic variation, and emphasises the vulnerability of genetic biodiversity to reductions in the extent of species' ranges.
Highlights
Conservation practitioners have limited resources to carry out their work, and must mitigate extinction threats to species and populations against a background of activities that compete with conservation for land use
No rare alleles were detected in any populations of C. eriophorum, C. heterophyllum or D. deltoides
We found that rare alleles (≤ 0.05 in frequency range-wide) were challenging to capture within simulated in-situ conservation networks
Summary
Conservation practitioners have limited resources to carry out their work, and must mitigate extinction threats to species and populations against a background of activities that compete with conservation for land use. Recent ex-situ guidelines range from relatively small targets (e.g. collection of seed from 10 individuals in each of five populations; Centre for Plant Conservation (CPC, 1991) to comprehensive collections of germplasm (Brown and Marshall, 1995). These ex-situ guidelines are relevant to, and have been extended to include, the conservation of genetic diversity in situ (Dulloo et al, 2008; Neel and Cummings, 2003a). Ex-situ populations can rapidly become genetically diverged from their source populations (Lauterbach et al, 2012), may lose adaptation to their source environment, and may become inbred (Schoen and Brown, 2001), highlighting the need for complementary in-situ conservation
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