Along with an international team of conservation and population geneticists, I’ve helped develop and calculate genetic diversity indicators–metrics that serve as proxies for the genetic status of a species and which can be determined with or without genetic data. These indicators are included in the Center for Biological Diversity’s Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity framework. I recently coauthored a paper outlining the calculation of these indicators for nine different countries, and am currently working on calculating indicator values for North American trees.

Botanic gardens and arboreta strive to protect not just species diversity, but the genetic diversity within those species. In order for genetic diversity to be conserved ex situ, wild individuals need to be sampled and genotyped fairly intensely, which can be time-consuming and expensive. This project seeks to understand how well a strong geographic representation of a species is predictive of a thorough genetic representation. This project builds off of gap analysis approaches used to assess how ex situ conservation can be improved.

Myself and others the Hoban Lab conducted a comparison of SNP and microsatellite markers from 2 rare oaks (Quercus acerifolia and Q. boyntonii) to examine how using each impacts ex situ conservation metrics. The paper can be found here! This work is part of the larger Global Conservation Consortium of Oaks, and was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.