The conservation genetics toolbox
Since the late 1960’s, conservation genetics has grown from a handful of techniques into a fully-fledged discipline that uses genetic information to inform the conservation management of threatened species worldwide (Avise 2008). This field has developed a substantive toolbox applied to understand phylogenetics and species delimitation (e.g., Yusefi et al., 2020; Coimbra et al., 2021), population structure and demographics (e.g., Coimbra et al., 2020), natural community profiling (e.g., Young et al., 2020), and the level of standing genetic variation within and among populations (e.g., Zhang, Luan, Ren, Hu, & Yin, 2020). Much discussion regarding the conservation genetic toolbox has been dedicated to the types of variants that are used for genetic inference, and for good reason: in a relatively short time frame, the field has experienced remarkable growth, from detecting variants using allozyme protein electrophoresis to detecting hundreds of thousands of variants through high throughput sequencing (HTS) approaches (Hohenlohe, Funk, & Rajora, 2021). While the field of conservation genetics was founded on managing putatively neutral diversity as a proxy for evolutionary potential (Yoder, Poelstra, Tiley, & Williams, 2018), new HTS sequencing and computational tools make it possible for researchers to elucidate the genomic basis of functional traits important to adaptation, which has important implications to understanding how species may respond to a changing world (Hoelzel, Bruford, & Fleischer, 2019; Mable, 2019).
As HTS continues to advance, there will no doubt be more new and exciting tools incorporated into conservation genetic inquiry. In addition to new methods enabled by advances in HTS, there remains one long-standing tool within the conservation genetics toolbox that is often overlooked: the pedigree. Pedigrees, or documented ancestry of individuals in a population, have been recorded by humans for millennia. These family trees have long provided a proxy for understanding the transmission of traits from generation to generation, and maintain diverse applications in agriculture (e.g., Smith, Duvick, Smith, Cooper, & Feng, 2004), human health (Bennett, 2011), evolutionary biology (Kruuk & Hill, 2008), and conservation (e.g., Ballou et al., 2010). Sewall Wright famously advanced the utility of pedigrees through his contributions towards pedigree-based path analysis, inbreeding, and kinship estimates (Wright, 1922; Ballou, 1983). Using Mendelian inheritance, pedigrees provide an estimate of kinship as the probability of alleles being identical-by-descent (IBD) from a common ancestor (Lacy, 1995). As the fields of conservation biology and genetics emerged in the second half of the 20th century, these same principles were used to estimate kinship, inbreeding, and heritability of functional traits in threatened populations in an effort to conserve evolutionary potential.