Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
Center for Biodiversity and Global Change, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
Conserv Biol. 2023 Aug;37(4):e14064. doi: 10.1111/cobi.14064. Epub 2023 Apr 6.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List is an important and widely used tool for conservation assessment. The IUCN uses information about a species' range, population size, habitat quality and fragmentation levels, and trends in abundance to assess extinction risk. Genetic diversity is not considered, although it affects extinction risk. Declining populations are more strongly affected by genetic drift and higher rates of inbreeding, which can reduce the efficiency of selection, lead to fitness declines, and hinder species' capacities to adapt to environmental change. Given the importance of conserving genetic diversity, attempts have been made to find relationships between red-list status and genetic diversity. Yet, there is still no consensus on whether genetic diversity is captured by the current IUCN Red List categories in a way that is informative for conservation. To assess the predictive power of correlations between genetic diversity and IUCN Red List status in vertebrates, we synthesized previous work and reanalyzed data sets based on 3 types of genetic data: mitochondrial DNA, microsatellites, and whole genomes. Consistent with previous work, species with higher extinction risk status tended to have lower genetic diversity for all marker types, but these relationships were weak and varied across taxa. Regardless of marker type, genetic diversity did not accurately identify threatened species for any taxonomic group. Our results indicate that red-list status is not a useful metric for informing species-specific decisions about the protection of genetic diversity and that genetic data cannot be used to identify threat status in the absence of demographic data. Thus, there is a need to develop and assess metrics specifically designed to assess genetic diversity and inform conservation policy, including policies recently adopted by the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
世界自然保护联盟（IUCN）红色名录是评估保护状况的重要且广泛使用的工具。IUCN 利用物种分布范围、种群大小、栖息地质量和破碎化水平以及数量趋势等信息来评估灭绝风险。遗传多样性虽然会影响灭绝风险，但并未被列入考虑范围。种群数量减少会受到遗传漂变和更高的近亲繁殖率的强烈影响，这会降低选择效率，导致适应性下降，并阻碍物种适应环境变化的能力。鉴于保护遗传多样性的重要性，人们试图寻找红色名录状况与遗传多样性之间的关系。然而，目前关于遗传多样性是否以对保护具有信息性的方式被纳入当前 IUCN 红色名录类别，仍未达成共识。为了评估遗传多样性与 IUCN 红色名录状况之间相关性的预测能力，我们综合了之前的工作，并基于 3 种遗传数据类型（线粒体 DNA、微卫星和全基因组）重新分析了数据集。与之前的工作一致，所有标记类型的灭绝风险较高的物种往往具有较低的遗传多样性，但这些关系较弱，并且在不同类群中存在差异。无论标记类型如何，遗传多样性都不能准确识别任何分类群的受威胁物种。我们的研究结果表明，红色名录状况不是指导保护遗传多样性的物种特定决策的有用指标，并且在没有人口统计数据的情况下，遗传数据不能用于识别威胁状况。因此，需要开发和评估专门用于评估遗传多样性并为保护政策提供信息的指标，包括最近被联合国生物多样性公约《昆明-蒙特利尔全球生物多样性框架》采纳的政策。
