Lott, Matthew J., Frankham, Greta J., Eldridge, Mark D.B., Alquezar-Planas, David E., Donnelly, Lily, Zenger, Kyall R., Leigh, Kellie A., Kjeldsen, Shannon R., Field, Matt A., Lemon, John, Lunney, Daniel, Crowther, Mathew S., Krockenberger, Mark B., Fisher, Mark, and Neaves, Linda E. (2024) Reversing the decline of threatened koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) populations in New South Wales: Using genomics to enhance conservation outcomes. Ecology and Evolution, 14 (8). e11700.

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Abstract

Genetic management is a critical component of threatened species conservation. Understanding spatial patterns of genetic diversity is essential for evaluating the resilience of fragmented populations to accelerating anthropogenic threats. Nowhere is this more relevant than on the Australian continent, which is experiencing an ongoing loss of biodiversity that exceeds any other developed nation. Using a proprietary genome complexity reduction-based method (DArTSeq), we generated a data set of 3239 high quality Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) to investigate spatial patterns and indices of genetic diversity in the koala (Phascolarctos cinereus), a highly specialised folivorous marsupial that is experiencing rapid and widespread population declines across much of its former range. Our findings demonstrate that current management divisions across the state of New South Wales (NSW) do not fully represent the distribution of genetic diversity among extant koala populations, and that care must be taken to ensure that translocation paradigms based on these frameworks do not inadvertently restrict gene flow between populations and regions that were historically interconnected. We also recommend that koala populations should be prioritised for conservation action based on the scale and severity of the threatening processes that they are currently faced with, rather than placing too much emphasis on their perceived value (e.g., as reservoirs of potentially adaptive alleles), as our data indicate that existing genetic variation in koalas is primarily partitioned among individual animals. As such, the extirpation of koalas from any part of their range represents a potentially critical reduction of genetic diversity for this iconic Australian species.

Item ID:	84214
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2045-7758
Keywords:	conservation genomics, Phascolarctos cinereus, phylogeography, threatened species management, wildlife monitoring
Copyright Information:	© 2024 The Author(s). Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Date Deposited:	03 Dec 2024 23:33
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