Conservation genomics: Current applications and future directions.

Abstract

In October 2021, during a fortuitous lull in the number of covid cases, over 150 masked and vaccinated conservation genomicists met at Snowbird, Utah, for AGA’s 2021 President’s Symposium (https://www.theaga.org/agatwentytwentyone). For many of us, this was our first travel in close to 2 yr and certainly the first attendance of a meeting of this size since the onset of the pandemic. The audience was primed with excitement to survey advances in the field of conservation ­genomics. Throughout 2 d of excellent talks, we explored adaptation to climate change, genetic monitoring and genetic rescue, genomics of disease, and conservation genomics in action. In the last decades, the field of conservation genomics has vastly increased our ability to address pressing questions about threats to biodiversity and to predict the likely outcomes of organisms responding to a changing world (Stefanoudis et al. 2021; Chen et al. 2022; Theissinger et al. 2023). The causes for these rapid advances in our field are many, including the types and amount of data we can now collect from species in the wild, the analytical advances that allow us to query responses at the scale of entire genomes, and the integration of data from different sources (e.g. environmental, historical, demographic) with genomic datasets to better inform conservation. These themes repeatedly emerged throughout the symposium talks and contributed papers and highlight how the synergy between them has so quickly moved conservation genetics from an established discipline focused on genetic variation to a new field of conservation genomics—one that aims to predict organismal responses to global change and propose management responses in that framework (Hogg et al. 2022; Andrews et al. 2023; Meek et al. 2023).