Genomic approaches to mitigating genetic diversity loss in declining populations

The accelerating pace of global biodiversity loss is exacerbated by habitat fragmentation and subsequent inbreeding in small populations. To mitigate this issue, assisted breeding programs designed to protect small populations can be enhanced by incorporating genomic information. In this study, we use genomic tools to optimize genetic pairing in an assisted breeding program for a highly inbred population of Western burrowing owls. To maximize genetic diversity in the resulting offspring, we begin by creating an optimal pairing decision tree based on sex, kinship, and patterns of homozygosity across the genome. To evaluate the effectiveness of our strategy, we compare genetic diversity, brood size, and nestling success rates between optimized and non-optimized pairs. Additionally, we leverage recently discovered correlations between telomere length and fitness across species to investigate whether genomic optimization could have long-term fitness benefits. Our results indicate that pairi..., ,