We had two new members join the Hoban lab this month: Mikaely Evans, a rising junior at Macalaster College, started her time in the Hoban lab as a NSF REU; and Samarth Mohan, a rising high school junior, started working as a volunteer. Very exciting news and welcome to them both!

Additionally, Emily Schumacher was promoted to the Tree Conservation Biology Lab Manager in the lab. ​In her new role, Emily will work closely with the lab scientist in planning new methodologies and initiatives to continue to grow the Tree Conservation Biology program and increase her role in managing budgets and grant reporting. With Emily’s guidance, the program will seek ways to more effectively research and disseminate knowledge on tree conservation biology, mentor future plant conservationists, and manage a complex set of strategic partnerships including NSF, IMLS, USGS, IUCN, the US Botanic Garden and US Forest Service.

Publications: 

• Hoban, S., Da Silva, J., Mastretta-Yanes, A., et al., 2022. Monitoring status and trends in genetic diversity for the Convention on Biological Diversity: an ongoing assessment of genetic indicators in nine countries. Conservation Letters. Open Access. #A1, B1, A2, C3
  • This paper describes a project underway to apply indicators of genetic diversity conservation which are affordable and simple, in nine countries around the world. We address concerns of policy makers and implementation challenges, and describe a roadmap for further development and deployment, incorporating feedback from a broad community. We demonstrate that countries can successfully and cost-effectively report the status of species’ genetic diversity and adaptive capacity with existing biodiversity observation data, and, in doing so, better conserve the Earth's biodiversity.

Outreach: 

• ​​Sean Hoban, Tree Conservation biologist has been invited to join the Whitebark Pine Recovery Plan Genetics Working Group.  This team, led by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, is advising on writing a Recovery Plan for whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), which was recently listed under the Endangered Species Act.  The recovery plan will have a goal of listing all activities needed to recover the species to the point it can be delisted.

Project Progress: 

In honor of women's history month, the arboretum hosted a women in the environment series. Research assistants Emily Schumacher and Austin Koontz attended one of these talks by Tanisha Williams, PhD, one of the founders of #BlackBotanistsWeek who is a postdoc at Bucknell University. Tanisha spoke about her personal relationship with botany and how many other black women have been foundational to our understandings of planets, and also how we can connect more people of color with botany. What an incredible talk!

News 

• Chloe Hendrikse, a 2022 NSF REU student, will be a REEF (Research Experience Extension Fellow) for fall 2022 and spring 2023.  She will expand her research on oak hybridization.  Specifically, Chloe’s using computer simulations to determine how well a  commonly used method in population genetics can detect hybrids among oak species, when many species are present together (as in a botanic garden or arboretum). This research will provide advice to studies currently being designed in the Hoban and Hipp labs, and its findings will ultimately guide conservationists interested in sampling seed from rare trees in botanic gardens by answering the question “How likely is it that those seeds are ‘true’ to their parent species?”. Chloe is mentored primarily by Austin Koontz and Sean Hoban, with Emily Schumacher and Kaylee Rosenberger providing support.  Chloe will improve her skills in R coding, reproducible research, and science communication.

Presentations

• Sean Hoban was an invited speaker, small group facilitator, and panel discussion member for a symposium hosted by the British Ecological Society on September 15th. The symposium was “Climate Change Genomics: Vulnerability, Adaptations and Applications”. Sean spoke on the day dedicated to applications and management. His talk was “Conserving genetic diversity to help species survive climate change... without having genetic data.” The talk described his work on adaptive capacity indicators and their use in global conservation policy and federal endangered species legislation, and also described Emily Beckman Bruns and Murphy Westwood’s work on gap analysis. #Audience size: 50. #Audience type: scientists and students.
• Sean Hoban, Tree Conservation Biologist, gave a short talk on ​Friday, September 23 about his research and broadly about the resources and impact of The Center for Tree Science and The Morton Arboretum at the annual “Darwin retreat” of the University of Chicago.  The event was in person at the Museum of Science and Industry.  Audience size: 50, primarily graduate students and other early career people.
• At the International Oak Society (IOS) conference in New Mexico,  Austin Koontz (RA II) presented on his work concentrated on the difference in conservation recommendations when analyzing rare oaks with different genetic markers. Austin’s presentation shows how measures of ex situ conservation can be impacted by the use of different genetic markers, with findings from 2 rare oaks endemic to the southeastern U.S. (Quercus acerifolia and Q. boyntonii). His findings will help future studies of conservation genetics design their studies, and will help us better understand minimum sample sizes needed for conservation groves for rare oaks.
• ​Sean Hoban gave a guest lecture (virtual) to Dr. Jill Hamilton’s Conservation Genetics class at Pennsylvania State University.

Publications

• Sean Hoban, Tree Conservation Biologist, wrote an article for the September newsletter of the Center for Plant Conservation.  In the article, he wrote about recent advances that his lab, and other leading conservationists, have made towards ex situ conservation.  He reviewed how we can assess genetic and ecogeographic diversity in botanic garden collections, provided practical advice for seed collectors in the field, and emphasized the importance of being involved in policy making at national and global scales. You can read the article here.
• Sean Hoban, Tree Conservation Biologist, contributed expertise and guidance to a recently published IUCN document, “Selecting species and populations for monitoring of genetic diversity” by Hvilsom et al., available for free here.
• Kaylee Rosenberger, Emily Schumacher, Sean Hoban, Alissa Brown. 2022. Species-tailored sampling guidelines remain an efficient method to conserve genetic diversity ex situ: A study on threatened oaks. Biological Conservation. 
  • A major question in ex situ conservation is how many seeds or plants to conserve to ensure the species can survive in the long term. Recent work in the Hoban Conservation Biology Lab has shown that some characteristics of species are important to consider when choosing this number. In this project we tested whether one ex situ sample size could perform well for all threatened oaks.  We first found that one sample size is not appropriate for all oaks- the minimum size for 14 USA threatened oaks ranged from 75 to more than 500 - not all oaks are alike!  We also showed that simulations can be used to tailor the recommended size to each species’ number of populations, population fragmentation, and population sizes - we can determine the size needed for each species! This should help conserve these rare oaks, and other threatened trees more effectively.

News

• The Morton Arboretum has received an IMLS National Leadership Grant titled “Establishing a scientific basis for managing genetic diversity in botanic garden collections.” The project will examine (1) the level of duplication/ backup of different provenances conserved in botanical gardens using GIS tools, (2) the relationship between genetic diversity conserved and ecogeographic diversity conserved using genetic and GIS tools, and (3) the extent of hybridization occurring in botanical gardens.  The knowledge from these studies will be useful for curation and collection plans for better conserving threatened trees in metacollections.  The project will be led by Sean Hoban with support from Murphy Westwood and Silvia Alvarez Clare and will involve collaboration with the following gardens: Huntington, Atlanta, San Diego, Huntsville, Chicago and Auburn (with additional partners advising), as well as Botanic Gardens Conservation International. #B2, #C1, #A

​Publications

• 2022. Over half of threatened species require targeted recovery actions to avert human-induced extinction. FC Bolam, J Ahumada, HR Akçakaya, TM Brooks, W Elliott, S Hoban, L Mair, D Mallon, PJK McGowan, D Raimondo, JP Rodríguez, D Roe, MB Seddon, X Shen, SN Stuart, JEM Watson, SHM Butchart. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Open access. A new Global Framework is currently being negotiated by the world’s governments through the Convention on Biological Diversity. Here we explored how suggested targets in this framework could contribute to reducing threats to species. We found that extinction risk for over half (57%) of threatened species would not be reduced sufficiently without a target promoting recovery actions, including ex situ conservation, reintroductions, and other species-specific interventions. We conclude that intensive recovery efforts are needed for successful conservation, in addition to reducing drivers (pollution, forest loss, overharvest, etc.)
  • A nice news article in the Anthropocene Magazine covers this here.
• 2022. Thurfjell, H., Laikre, L., Ekblom, R., Hoban, S. and Sjögren-Gulve, P., 2022. Practical application of indicators for genetic diversity in CBD post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework implementation. Ecological Indicators. Open access. This is the first large-scale test of indicators for reporting on genetic diversity conservation, first proposed by Hoban in 2020. The indicators are designed for assessing genetic threats, without needing costly and slow genetic data collection- just using available geographic and demographic data. This project, led by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, determined that data for the indicators are available and can be extracted from textual analysis of national Red List reports and national biodiversity databases, and can be used, for at least thousands of species (20-30% of all species examined). 
• 2022. LND Santo, S Hoban, TL Parchman, JW Wright, JAHamilton. Reduced representation sequencing to understand the evolutionary history of Torrey pine (Pinus torreyana Parry) with implications for rare species conservation. Molecular Ecology. This study assesses the need and potential for genetic rescue (boost in genetic diversity and fitness) by moving seeds and seedlings among populations of the rarest pine tree in the world, Torrey pine, a California coastal endemic. The study finds that each population does have low genetic diversity, but each population also has adaptations to its unique environment (one island, which is more exposed to salt and wind, and one mainland).  The authors conclude that genetic rescue could be useful but should proceed cautiously.
  • A nice article about this study from Penn State here.
• Hoban, S and Laikre, L. Conference presentation. “Testing genetic diversity indicators for the post 2020 CBD, including effective population size.” Speaking at G-Bike workshop “Testing Genetic Indicators for the Convention on Biological Diversity” in Brasov, Romania (virtual talk).