Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine,Graham Kerr Building, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK.
Scottish Natural Heritage, Clydebank Business Park, Clydebank G81 2NR, UK.
Trends Ecol Evol. 2017 Oct;32(10):746-759. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2017.07.002. Epub 2017 Aug 7.
Unprecedented rates of species extinction increase the urgency for effective conservation biology management practices. Thus, any improvements in practice are vital and we suggest that conservation can be enhanced through recent advances in evolutionary biology, specifically advances put forward by evolutionary developmental biology (i.e., evo-devo). There are strong overlapping conceptual links between conservation and evo-devo whereby both fields focus on evolutionary potential. In particular, benefits to conservation can be derived from some of the main areas of evo-devo research, namely phenotypic plasticity, modularity and integration, and mechanistic investigations of the precise developmental and genetic processes that determine phenotypes. Using examples we outline how evo-devo can expand into conservation biology, an opportunity which holds great promise for advancing both fields.
物种灭绝的速度前所未有，这增加了实施有效保护生物学管理实践的紧迫性。因此，任何实践上的改进都是至关重要的，我们认为，通过进化生物学的最新进展，特别是通过进化发育生物学（即进化发育生物学）的进展，可以增强保护。保护和进化发育生物学之间存在着很强的重叠概念联系，因为这两个领域都关注进化潜力。具体来说，进化发育生物学的一些主要研究领域，如表型可塑性、模块性和整合性，以及对决定表型的精确发育和遗传过程的机械研究，可以为保护带来好处。我们将举例说明进化发育生物学如何扩展到保护生物学，这为两个领域的发展提供了巨大的机遇。
