Combining ecological and genetic data to determine the exchangeability of populations for conservation

Authors: Russell R. Rader, Mark C. Belk, Dennis K. Shiozawa, Keith A. Crandall

Year: 2012 (xliv)

Abstract

Resource managers often decide which local populations should be preserved to maintain intraspecific variation and they often determine which local populations would enhance captive-breeding programs, augment endangered local populations, and which populations could best be used to re-introduce native species into historically occupied areas. Populations are ecologically exchangeable when individuals can be moved between different local sites and still occupy the same ecological niche. Populations that are in-exchangeable are synonymous with local populations adapted to different environmental conditions. I will describe a procedure that uses the complementary strengths, while recognizing the limitations, of both molecular genetic data and ecological experiments to determine the ecological exchangeability of local populations within a species. This is the first synthesis of a combined approach (experiments and genetics). Although it would be ideal to find functional genes that interact to influence quantitative traits resulting in ecological differences (e.g. growth, size, fecundity), we suggest that our current knowledge of functional markers is too limited for most species to use them to differentiate adaptively different local populations. Thus, we argue that ecological experiments using whole organisms combined with neutral markers that indicate evolutionary divergence, provide the strongest case for detecting adaptive differences among local populations.