Academic Unit of Reproductive and Developmental Medicine, Department of Oncology & Metabolism, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom; email:
Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, National Zoological Park, Washington, DC, USA; email:
Annu Rev Anim Biosci. 2022 Feb 15;10:491-511. doi: 10.1146/annurev-animal-013120-030858. Epub 2021 Oct 26.
Reproductive science in the context of conservation biology is often understood solely in terms of breeding threatened species. Although technologies developed primarily for agriculture or biomedicine have a potentially important role in species conservation, their effectiveness is limited if we regard the main objective of animal conservation as helping to support populations rather than to breed a small number of individuals. The global threats facing wild species include the consequences of climate change, population growth, urbanization, atmospheric and water pollution, and the release of chemicals into the environment, to cite but a few. Reproductive sciences provide important and often unexpected windows into many of these consequences, and our aim here is both to demonstrate the breadth of reproductive science and the importance of basic knowledge and to suggest where some of the insights might be useful in mitigating the problems.
生殖科学在保护生物学的背景下通常仅被理解为繁殖受威胁物种。尽管主要为农业或生物医学开发的技术在物种保护中具有潜在的重要作用，但如果我们将动物保护的主要目标视为帮助维持种群而不是繁殖少数个体，那么它们的有效性是有限的。野生动物面临的全球威胁包括气候变化、人口增长、城市化、大气和水污染以及化学物质释放到环境中等后果，仅举几例。生殖科学为许多这些后果提供了重要且常常出人意料的窗口，我们在这里的目的既是展示生殖科学的广泛应用，也是强调基础知识的重要性，并提出一些可能有助于缓解这些问题的见解。
