Abstract
The reintroduction is an important conservation tool to restore a species in its historically distribution area, but the rate of reintroduction success varies across species or regions due to different reasons. Genetic evaluation is important to the conservation management of reintroduced species. Conservation concerns relate to genetic threats for species with a small population size or severely historically bottle-necked species, such as negative consequences associated with loss of genetic diversity and inbreeding. The last 40years have seen a rapid increasing of population size for Père David’s deer (Elaphurus davidianus), which originated from a limited founder population. However, the genetic structure of reintroduced Père David’s deer has not been investigated in terms of population genomics, and it is still not clear about the evolutionary history of Père David’s deer and to what extent the inbreeding level is. Conservation genomics methods were used to reconstruct the demographic history of Père David’s deer, evaluate genetic diversity, and characterize genetic structure among 18 individuals from the captive, free-ranging and wild populations. The results showed that 1,456,457 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were obtained for Père David’s deer, and low levels of genome-wide genetic diversity were observed in Père David’s deer compared with Red deer (Cervus elaphus) and Sika deer (Cervus nippon). A moderate population genetic differentiation was detected among three populations of Père David’s deer, especially between the captive population in Beijing Père David’s deer park and the free-ranging population in Jiangsu Dafeng National Nature Reserve. The effective population size of Père David’s deer started to decline ~25.8ka, and the similar levels of three populations’ LD reflected the genetic impacts of long-term population bottlenecks in the Père David’s deer. The findings of this study could highlight the necessity of individual exchange between different facilities, and genetic management should generally be integrated into conservation planning with other management considerations.
Highlights
The reintroduction has been increasingly used as an important and effective conservation tool to recover locally extirpated species, and a common tool for restoring lost biodiversity (Earnhardt, 1999; Armstrong and Seddon, 2008; Stewart et al, 2017)
Genetic diversity available for reintroduced populations is determined by the genetic background of the source population, which in turn is heavily impacted by the demographic history (Aspi et al, 2006)
Conservation concerns relate to genetic threats for species with a small population size or severely historically bottle-necked species, such as negative consequences associated with loss of genetic diversity and inbreeding (Haig et al, 1990; Ewen et al, 2012)
Summary
The reintroduction has been increasingly used as an important and effective conservation tool to recover locally extirpated species, and a common tool for restoring lost biodiversity (Earnhardt, 1999; Armstrong and Seddon, 2008; Stewart et al, 2017). The source of reintroduced populations is limited because of a small population size of founder individuals, which would result in a low level of genetic diversity and limited gene flow (Stewart et al, 2017; Ovenden et al, 2019) This means it is necessary to conduct population genetics after reintroduction, such post-reintroduction evaluation is inadequate (Moseby et al, 2020), and genetic consequences following wild release still remain unknown for many cases (La Haye et al, 2017). A key challenge of reintroduction efforts is to translocate individuals in a way that prevents loss of genetic variation, and avoids genetic differentiation relative to source populations (Barbanti et al, 2019) Such a challenge would have intensified, especially for a species that has recovered from a remnant population with historically low levels of genetic variation (Malone et al, 2018). Several studies have evaluated genetic consequences induced by reintroduction events for some ungulates using traditional molecular markers, for example, Przewalskii’s wild horse (Equus ferus; Liu et al, 2014), European bison (Bison bonasus; Olech and Perzanowski, 2002), and Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx; El Alqamy et al, 2012), but only very few studies use genomics data to evaluate post-reintroduction genetic consequences (Flesch et al, 2020)
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