Conservation aquaculture of wild-origin offspring preserves genetic diversity in an endangered population of white sturgeon

Conservation aquaculture programs that release fish to supplement wild populations can potentially capture greater genetic diversity by collecting offspring as embryos and larvae from wild spawning events than by producing them conventionally from broodstock. A conservation aquaculture program for the endangered white sturgeon population of the Upper Columbia River initially utilized wild broodstock for 14 years before fully transitioning to rearing wild-origin offspring in 2014. Here we evaluated the performance of this program in capturing the wild population’s genetic diversity since transitioning to wild-origin offspring. We analyzed genotypes of 325 tetrasomic single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers in more than 5,000 offspring reared from 2014 through 2020 and over 1,000 wild adults from the population. Genetic diversity statistics were highly similar between each offspring year class and the wild adult population. We inferred sibship structure to estimate the total number of..., These genotypes were assembled through GTseq with the white sturgeon panel developed by Delomas et al. 2021., , # Data from: Conservation aquaculture of wild-origin offspring preserves genetic diversity in an endangered population of white sturgeon

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fqz612k2m](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fqz612k2m)

## Description of the data and file structure

These data consist of two Excel spreadsheets with the tetrasomic SNP genotypes analyzed in this study. UCR_WS_genotypes_offspring.xlsx contains genotypes of offspring that were collected from the wild as neonates, reared in aquaculture, and released as juveniles. UCR_WS_genotypes*_*adults.xlsx contains genotypes of adults in the wild population that were sampled during a long-term capture-mark-recapture (CMR) study. 

#### File: UCR\_WS\_genotypes\_offspring.xlsx

**Description:** 

Full genotypes for 325 tetrasomic SNPs per sample. Ungenotyped SNPs are indicated by 'na'.

Offspring sample IDs have a structure of multiple sections separated by underscores (e.g. BY14_FDR_345, BY14_WAN_G1_0001):

* The first section consists...