Integrative approaches to guide conservation decisions: using genomics to define conservation units and functional corridors

Climate change and increasing habitat loss greatly impact species survival, requiring range shifts, phenotypic plasticity and/or evolutionary change for long term persistence, which may not readily occur unaided in threatened species. Therefore, defining conservation actions requires a detailed assessment of evolutionary factors. Existing genetic diversity needs to be thoroughly evaluated and spatially mapped to define conservation units (CUs) in an evolutionary context, and we address that here. We also propose a multidisciplinary approach to determine corridors and functional connectivity between CUs by including genetic diversity in the modelling while controlling for isolation-by-distance and phylogeographic history. We evaluate our approach on a near-threatened Iberian endemic rodent by analysing genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) genomic data from 107 Cabrera voles (Microtus cabrerae), screening the entire species distribution to define categories of CUs and their connectivity: we def...