Conserving evolutionary processes

TL;DR: In this paper, a decision support tool is proposed to support the conservation of habitats that contain key evolutionary processes, such as amphibians, birds, and mammals, by using genetic data.

Abstract: One of the most fundamental aims in conservation is to ensure the long-term persistence of biodiversity. To achieve this goal, hundreds of thousands of protected areas have been set aside globally to buffer species from anthropogenic impacts and provide a platform for management actions. To be effective, protected areas must preserve existing patterns of biodiversity (e.g. species, ecosystems) and also the evolutionary processes that create new patterns of biodiversity. By ensuring that disruptions to evolutionary processes are minimized, protected areas can help maintain existing patterns of genetic diversity and facilitate adaptation to new threats. This is particularly important in a world where environmental change is rapidly accelerating. However, despite this, evolutionary processes are rarely considered when siting new protected areas or evaluating existing protected area systems.The main goal of this thesis is to improve our understanding of how evolutionary processes can be incorporated into conservation planning to deliver more effective protected areas. To achieve this goal, I develop a novel decision support tool to target intra-specific variation in conservation prioritizations (Chapter 2). I then investigate potential surrogates for representing intra-specific genetic variation (Chapter 3) and maintaining gene flow in prioritizations (Chapter 4). Finally, I evaluate how well the existing protected area system is representing adaptive processes for nearly every vertebrate species on Earth (Chapter 5).Building prioritizations that conserve evolutionary processes has been a long standing challenge in conservation planning. In Chapter 2, I develop a new decision support tool---the raptr R package---for generating multi-species prioritizations that minimize the overall cost of the solution whilst (i) securing a representative sample of the intra-specific variation for each species, (ii) providing an adequate amount of habitat for each species, and (iii) minimizing the level of overall fragmentation in the solution. By applying this method to simulated and case-study species, I show that conservation planners need to explicitly target intra-specific variation---otherwise they risk losing it. This chapter paves the way for using intra-specific variation to guide the selection of nature reserves. After developing this decision support tool, I use it to examine potential surrogates for conserving evolutionary processes.One of the key reasons that evolutionary processes are not often used to guide reserve selection is that substantial resources and expertise are needed to obtain and analyze genetic data. In Chapters 3 and 4, I investigate the effectiveness of strategies for capturing evolutionary processes using freely available genetic data for multiple alpine plant species. In Chapter 3, I show that prioritizations capturing a representative sample of the climatic variation and geographic spread across species' distributions tend also to capture a large proportion of species' adaptive and neutral genetic variation. In Chapter 4, I found that conventional approaches for increasing connectivity may not actually result in prioritizations that maintain strong levels of gene flow. These findings illustrate how genetic data can be used to guide conservation planning. Furthermore, they show that freely available data can, at least in some cases, be used to deliver effective protected area systems even when genetic data are not available. After demonstrating that environmental data can be used as a surrogate for conserving evolutionary processes, I then use environmental data to explore how well the existing global protected area system is conserving adaptive evolutionary processes.In response to the biodiversity crisis, 195 governments have signed the Convention on Biological Diversity. These nations have pledged to protect at least 17 % of the Earth's land and improve the conservation status for species at risk of extinction by the year 2020 (Aichi Targets 11 and 12). One of the components for monitoring progress made towards conserving biodiversity is the protection of habitats that contain "key evolutionary processes" (Annex I). By conserving populations in a wide range of climatic conditions, protected area systems can maximize the range of existing and potential local adaptations within a species. In Chapter 5, I discover that the global protected area system poorly represents the climatic conditions found across species' geographic distributions. To begin to address this shortfall, I also identify priority areas for protected area expansion. This work provides the first global assessment for how well protected areas are fostering adaptive evolutionary process for the world's amphibians, birds, and mammals.This thesis sheds new light on understanding how well evolutionary processes are conserved, and how conservation decisions can be made in a way that safeguards evolutionary processes. It combines ideas from conservation biology, decision science, and evolutionary biology. The discoveries made here will be relevant to a broad range of scientists working in conservation and genetics research, and also policy makers and planners engaged in protecting biodiversity. Careful utilization of the decision support tool (Chapter 2), genetic and surrogate data (Chapters 3 and 4), and priority areas (Chapter 5) outlined in this thesis could substantially increase the chances for the long-term persistence of biodiversity.