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 frameworks of landscape and population genomics to test predictions about the evolutionary outcomes of rapid environmental change and to explore their implications for conservation. The primary study organism is the American pika (Ochotona princeps), a small lagomorph discontinuously distributed in mountainous areas throughout western North America. Given its general perception as a high-elevation obligate, habitat specialist, the American pika has been predicted by some to become the first mammalian species to go extinct due to the direct effects of climate change. This work will have important implications for understanding biotic responses to climate change at the regional and landscape scales, while evaluating novel approaches for integrating knowledge of evolutionary potential with other critical factors (habitat quality, ecology, behavior) for informing conservation prioritization. This program will also play a fundamental role in training two PhD, three MSc, and ten undergraduate students. As genomic tools transcend individual disciplines, students will be equipped to pursue a diverse set of career opportunities within academia, government or the private sector. Moreover, the proposed research will offer opportunities for K-12 outreach through ScienceLIVE, providing subject matter for developing lesson plans and connecting classrooms within local communities to our research team through webinars and blogs from the field.