Conservation translocations can have many objectives. These must be carefully balanced by practitioners to produce an optimum management strategy. A primary genetic goal of conservation translocations should be to maximise genetic diversity. This is to ensure that a population has the best chance of persistence, not just over the coming decades, but centuries. Maximising genetic diversity will give a population the best chance of long-term resilience and adaptability, whether this allows it to adapt to a new life in the wild or withstand emergent diseases, climate change, ecological disruption, or other challenges.
If hybridisation is a threat, then its management against the backdrop of maximising genetic diversity provides a unique set of challenges and tensions.
Using over a decade of genetic data, gathered in support of Scottish wildcat, Sahelian antelope and Siamese crocodile conservation translocations, and data from model systems like red-sika deer hybridisation in Scotland, I will:
1) Outline how genetic technology has made great advancements in our measurement and real-time management of hybridisation and how genetic technology should (and should not) be used to manage hybridisation in a translocation context.
2) Explain why even with access to objective genetic data, we generally end up at a subjective set of decisions. What frameworks can practitioners use to guide these?