The genomic basis of adaptation to changing environments: applications to wildlife conservation

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Human modification of the environment, including large-scale habitat conversion and soaring greenhouse gas emissions, pose major threats to global biological diversity, directly linked to enhanced extinction rates 100 to 1,000 times greater than background levels. Maintaining species' ability to persist in changing environments ultimately means preserving genetic variation underlying ecologically important traits. Conservation genetic studies over the past three decades have played an important role in understanding genetic and evolutionary processes and in delineating the patterns that are relevant to managing endangered populations. However, major unresolved questions remain, largely associated with identifying fitness-related functional genetic variation for disentangling the relative roles of drift and selection underlying observed patterns and for exploring implications associated with how populations may adapt to changing environments. A main reason underlying this persistent challenge has been our inability to directly assay adaptive genetic variation at a broad-scale in natural populations of species of conservation interest. Population genomics provides a powerful approach for separating locus-specific effects in the form of outlier loci from genome-wide effects governed by neutral evolutionary processes. My research program combines the power of next-generation DNA sequencing and genotyping technologies with the analytical framework of landscape and population genomics to address basic and applied questions regarding local adaptation, population history and phylogeography, centered on the climate-sensitive American pika. This work will have direct implications for understanding biotic responses to climate change at the regional and landscape scales while formulating and evaluating novel approaches for integrating knowledge of evolutionary potential with other critical factors (habitat quality, ecology, behavior) for informing conservation prioritization.