Abstract
Although genomic diversity is increasingly recognised as a key component of biodiversity, it is seldom used to inform conservation planning. Estuaries and keystone species such as the seagrass, Zostera capensis, are under severe anthropogenic pressure and are often poorly protected. In this study we integrated Single Nucleotide Polymorphism data generated from populations of Z. capensis across the South African coastline into the spatial prioritisation tool Marxan. We included different measures of genomic variation to account for genomic diversity, distinctness and evolutionary potential to explore spatial planning scenarios. We investigated how conservation priority areas identified by targeting only habitat type differed from those identified by also including genomic measures; further we assessed how different genetic diversity metrics change prioritisation outcomes. All scenarios targeting genomic variation identified unique conservation prioritisation areas compared to scenarios only targeting habitat type. As such, omitting these estuaries from regional Marine Protected Areas networks risks the loss of evolutionarily important populations, threatening resilience and persistence of associated estuarine communities and their ecosystem services. We also observed a high degree of overlap between prioritisation outcomes across targeted measures of genomic variation. As such, by including even single measures of genomic variation, it may be possible to sufficiently represent the evolutionary processes behind the patterns of variation, while simplifying the conservation prioritisation procedure.
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Data Availability
Genomic data used in this study is available through these repositories: NCBI (PRJNA503110); GeOMe project: Zostera capensis pooled RADseq; GitHub: https://github.com/vonderHeydenLab/Zostera-capensis-genomics.
Code availability
All R scripts are available at https://github.com/vonderHeydenLab/Zostera-capensis-genomics.
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This study was funded by the National Research Foundation through a Scarce Skills Doctoral Scholarship to Nikki Phair and the Western Indian Ocean Marine Sciences Association through the MARG I grant to Sophie von der Heyden.
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NP and SvdH conceived the study; NP generated and analysed data; NP wrote first draft; NP, EN and SvdH contributed to editing and writing of the drafts.
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Phair, N.L., Nielsen, E.S. & von der Heyden, S. Applying genomic data to seagrass conservation. Biodivers Conserv 30, 2079–2096 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-021-02184-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-021-02184-w