4th Annual Meeting in Conservation Genetics 2020

The illegal wildlife trade is having a devastating effect on the status of many endangered species, including some of our most charismatic large animals and plants. Tackling the trade has become an area of global concern and concerted international efforts are underway to address the issue, involving support for alternative livelihoods in source countries, law enforcement and the supply chain, and demand reduction for wildlife products in end-user countries. Law enforcement is a complex issue, requiring investigations at many different scales, from local bushmeat poachers through to international organized criminals. As with any other crime, investigators are using forensic science to detect and prosecute offenders. The use of molecular genetic analysis to identify human evidence has revolutionised forensic science and is now an established tool in law enforcement. The analysis and identification of wildlife DNA is used to address questions of species identity, captive breeding and geographic origin, as well as individualization across multiple species. The resulting evidence is used to provide intelligence concerning trade routes as well as prosecute individuals involved in wildlife trafficking. This presentation will introduce the field of wildlife DNA forensics, explain the key scientific questions involved, from phylogenetics to familial relatedness, and how the transition to genomics is providing increasing powers of detection. It will also take a look at how forensic science capacity is being developed for wildlife law enforcement in Africa and Southeast Asia, and how new laboratories are contributing to wildlife law enforcement and its role in biodiversity conservation.

Speakers:

Rob Ogden

Over the last years genetics has become an integral part of wildlife forensics worldwide. Molecular methods can help with species identification, population sourcing (e.g. for illegally traded wildlife products), characterization of human-wildlife conflicts and even aid in human forensic case work. This session covers the current state and future directions of wildlife forensic genetics, with a special focus on newly emerging genomic methods.

Maintaining captive-breeding populations is of utmost importance for restocking and reintroduction projects and serves as an ark if species become extinct in the wild. While genetic tools play a crucial role in breeding management and monitoring reintroduction success, they are still not routinely applied in this field. The session focuses on outstanding research and application examples in the fields of breeding and reintroduction genetics.

Monitoring of elusive wildlife, such as large carnivores or game species, relies strongly on genetic analyses. The dependence on non-invasively collected samples with low DNA content hampers the methodological transfer from traditional multilocus genotyping techniques to genome-wide approaches. In this session we invite talks focusing on the implementation of NGS and other technologies in wildlife monitoring.

Conference dinner at the museum

The last centuries have seen tremendous turnovers in species distributions and biodiversity on a global scale, linked to direct anthropogenic modifications of the abiotic environment, heightened migration rates and climatic changes. In many cases, neither the relative roles of these drivers, the pace of change nor the original community of the ecosystem are well mapped or understood. Ancient environmental DNA (ancient eDNA) stored in sedimentary records contains historic information about organisms from across the tree of life, including taxa that do not leave behind visible traces. It can uncover cryptic changes not visible in morphology and offers novel possibilities to study biotic interactions and networks through time. Depending on the preservation conditions, genomic biodiversity records from sediments can globally be retrieved on scales from hundreds to thousands of years. At sites with exceptionally good preservation, such as the Arctic, records can even go back multiple hundreds of thousands of years, thereby spanning more than one glacial cycle of the Pleistocene. These high-latitude areas are of particular relevance for the study of current and past climatically induced ecosystem changes and offer a backdrop of natural variability of ecosystems since the Pleistocene. Complementary to this, sites from temperate and tropical regions have experienced more direct effects of human environmental history. While ancient eDNA thus has a lot to offer to the study of historical biodiversity change, both its full potential and limits are not yet conclusively established. For example, the DNA of macroorganisms is not uniformly distributed in the sedimentary environment, and its distribution is putatively linked to the biology of the organisms. However, for many organismic groups we can by now reliably trace community change through time by DNA metabarcoding as well as use more specific assays and genomic tools to track the dynamics of single species or populations. Current developments promise a more efficient utilization of this resource to inform conservation biology, identify restoration targets and offer an empirical body of data for ecological theory.

Speakers:

Laura Epp

We live in an era of unprecedented biodiversity loss. Large-scale monitoring projects are being carried out to better understand and subsequently counteract this rapid loss of biodiversity. Recent developments in high-throughput DNA sequencing have greatly facilitated the assessment and characterization of biological communities. In this session we will outline the current state and future direction of molecular-based biodiversity monitoring and assessment.

Genetische Methoden finden im Arten- und Naturschutz, wie auch im Biodiversitätsmonitoring mittlerweile eine breite Anwendung. Vertreter aus dem angewandten Natur- und Umweltschutz sind daher immer häufiger mit Ergebnissen genetischer Studien konfrontiert und müssen entscheiden, welche genetischen Methoden zur Beantwortung einer naturschutzfachlichen Frage angewendet werden sollen. Dieser Workshop ist speziell für Anwender im deutschsprachigen Raum konzipiert, die Grundlagenwissen im Bereich der Naturschutzgenetik erlangen möchten, die ihnen in bei der Integration genetischer Methoden in ihre Projekte helfen. Im Rahmen eines initialen “Crashkurs: Naturschutzgenetik” wird dieses Wissen auf anschauliche Wiese vermittelt und dann im Rahmen einiger Praxisbeispiele vertieft (z.B. eDNA-Einsatz im aquatischen Biodiversitätsmonitoring, genetisches Monitoring großer Beutegreifer, (Meta-)Barcoding zur schnellen, standardisierten Biodiversitätserfassung). Falls Sie nur an dem deutschsprachigen Workshop teilnehmen möchten, registrieren Sie sich bitte per Email bei Julia Intemann (Kontaktperson ist Julia Intemann – julia.intemann@senckenberg.de, cc an consgen20@senckenberg.de) unter Nennung von Name, Institution und Kontaktdaten.

A central part of conservation research and applications is the effective communication of results and recommendations to the general public, as well as policy and decision makers. This workshop aims at bridging the gap between policy and research, and explores effective ways to disseminate research results to the public via citizen-science and outreach.

Genetische Methoden finden im Arten- und Naturschutz, wie auch im Biodiversitätsmonitoring mittlerweile eine breite Anwendung. Vertreter aus dem angewandten Natur- und Umweltschutz sind daher immer häufiger mit Ergebnissen genetischer Studien konfrontiert und müssen entscheiden, welche genetischen Methoden zur Beantwortung einer naturschutzfachlichen Frage angewendet werden sollen. Dieser Workshop ist speziell für Anwender im deutschsprachigen Raum konzipiert, die Grundlagenwissen im Bereich der Naturschutzgenetik erlangen möchten, die ihnen in bei der Integration genetischer Methoden in ihre Projekte helfen. Im Rahmen eines initialen “Crashkurs: Naturschutzgenetik” wird dieses Wissen auf anschauliche Wiese vermittelt und dann im Rahmen einiger Praxisbeispiele vertieft (z.B. eDNA-Einsatz im aquatischen Biodiversitätsmonitoring, genetisches Monitoring großer Beutegreifer, (Meta-)Barcoding zur schnellen, standardisierten Biodiversitätserfassung). Falls Sie nur an dem deutschsprachigen Workshop teilnehmen möchten, registrieren Sie sich bitte per Email bei Julia Intemann (Kontaktperson ist Julia Intemann – julia.intemann@senckenberg.de, cc an consgen20@senckenberg.de) unter Nennung von Name, Institution und Kontaktdaten.