Global genetic diversity status and trends: towards a suite of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) for genetic composition Biological Reviews

Biodiversity underlies ecosystem resilience, ecosystem function, sustainable economies, and human well-being. Under- standing how biodiversity sustains ecosystems under anthropogenic stressors and global environmental change willrequire new ways of deriving and applying biodiversity data. A major challenge is that biodiversity data and knowledgeare scattered, biased, collected with numerous methods, and stored in inconsistent ways. The Group on Earth Observa-tions Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) has developed the Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) as fun-damental metrics to help aggregate, harmonize, and interpret biodiversity observation data from diverse sources. Mapping and analyzing EBVs can help to evaluate how aspects of biodiversity are distributed geographically and how they change over time. EBVs are also intended to serve as inputs and validation to forecast the status and trends of bio-diversity, and to support policy and decision making. Here, we assess the feasibility of implementing Genetic Composi-tion EBVs (Genetic EBVs), which are metrics of within-species genetic variation. We review and bring togethernumerous areas of the field of genetics and evaluate how each contributes to global and regional genetic biodiversity monitoring with respect to theory, sampling logistics, metadata, archiving, data aggregation, modeling, and technolog- ical advances. We propose four Genetic EBVs: ( i) Genetic Diversity; ( ii) Genetic Differentiation; ( iii) Inbreeding; and ( iv)