Treml, E. A. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2018

Operationalizing ecological connectivity in spatial conservation planning with Marxan Connect

O_LIGlobally, protected areas are being established to protect biodiversity and to promote ecosystem resilience. The typical spatial conservation planning process leading to the creation of these protected areas focuses on representation and replication of ecological features, often using decision support systems such as Marxan. Unfortunately, Marxan currently requires manual input or specialised scripts to explicitly consider ecological connectivity, a property critical to metapopulation persistence and resilience.\nC_LIO_LI\"Marxan Connect\" is a new open source, open access Graphical User Interface (GUI) designed to assist conservation planners in the systematic operationalization of ecological connectivity in protected area network planning.\nC_LIO_LIMarxan Connect is able to incorporate estimates of demographic connectivity (e.g. derived from tracking data, dispersal models, or genetics) or structural landscape connectivity (e.g. isolation by resistance). This is accomplished by calculating metapopulation-relevant connectivity metrics (e.g. eigenvector centrality) and treating those as conservation features, or using the connectivity data as a spatial dependency amongst sites to be included in the prioritization process.\nC_LIO_LIMarxan Connect allows a wide group of users to incorporate directional ecological connectivity into conservation plans. The least-cost conservation solutions provided by Marxan Connect, combined with ecologically relevant post-hoc testing, are more likely to support persistent and resilient metapopulations (e.g. fish stocks) and provide better protection for biodiversity than if connectivity is ignored.\nC_LI

ecology↗

bioRxiv2017

Adaptive pathways of coral populations on the Great Barrier Reef

Can genetic adaptation in reef-building corals keep pace with the current rate of sea surface warming? Here we combine population genomic, biophysical modeling, and evolutionary simulations to predict future adaptation of the common coral Acropora millepora on the Great Barrier Reef. Loss of coral cover in recent decades did not yet have detectable effect on genetic diversity in our species. Genomic analysis of migration patterns closely matched the biophysical model of larval dispersal in favoring the spread of existing heat-tolerant alleles from lower to higher latitudes. Given these conditions we find that standing genetic variation could be sufficient to fuel rapid adaptation of A. millepora to warming for the next 100-200 years, although random thermal anomalies would drive increasingly severe mortality episodes. However, this adaptation will inevitably cease unless the warming is slowed down, since no realistic mutation rate could replenish adaptive genetic variation fast enough.

evolutionary biology↗