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

人类改变环境，包括大规模改变生境和温室气体排放量激增，对全球生物多样性构成重大威胁，直接导致灭绝率比背景水平高出100至1 000倍。维持物种在不断变化的环境中生存的能力，最终意味着保护具有重要生态特征的遗传变异。保护遗传学研究在过去的三十年中发挥了重要作用，在了解遗传和进化过程，并在划定模式，管理濒危种群。然而，主要的未解决的问题仍然存在，主要是与确定健身相关的功能遗传变异解开漂移和选择的相对作用下观察到的模式，并探索与人口如何适应不断变化的环境的影响。这一持续挑战的一个主要原因是我们无法直接测定适应性遗传变异在大规模的自然种群的保护利益的物种。群体基因组学提供了一种强有力的方法来分离基因座特异性的影响，从中性进化过程所控制的基因组范围内的影响的离群位点的形式。我的研究计划结合了下一代DNA测序和基因分型技术的力量与景观和人口基因组学的分析框架，以解决有关当地适应，人口历史和生物地理学的基本和应用问题，以气候敏感的美国鼠兔为中心。这项工作将有直接的影响，了解生物对气候变化的反应，在区域和景观尺度，同时制定和评估新的方法，将知识的进化潜力与其他关键因素（栖息地质量，生态，行为）通知保护优先级。

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.