August 2022

This month, Emily Schumacher, RA II in the Hoban Conservation Biology lab, started surveying for ripe acorns for a project funded by the US Botanic garden sampling acorns from oak trees on the Morton Arboretum grounds. This work will focus on identifying the rate of hybridization (in acorns) between oak species in botanic gardens and determining the contributing causes of hybridization like age of pollen donor, spatial distance from other members of the species, and phylogenetic distance. Emily will be germinating ~500 acorn seedlings in the research cooler and then grow them in the greenhouse. In spring, she will sample DNA from the seedlings and from potential parent trees on the grounds. This project is also informed by Chloe Hendrikse’s REU project, which simulated this kind of study to help us design it. As you can see in the right-hand photo, this project has largely been a team effort - many people at the Center for Tree Science pitched into to get ready for the project!​

Big thanks to Meghan Midgely, Savannah Henderson, Jorge Jaime-Rivera, Abigail Leeper, Marvin Lo, Karina Orozco, and Brendon Reidy for helping sterilize the research fridge last week and also to Sean Hoban, Austin Koontz, and Jorge Jaime-Rivera for helping with the pole pruning. Emily is really excited to start collecting acorns and germinating them in a few weeks! Below are more pictures taken during preparatory field work: 

Several of the CTS employees celebrating getting the research fridge cleaned with pizza.

Austin Koontz, Jorge Jaime-Rivera, and Emily Schumacher use the pole pruner to collect acorns from Q. muehlenbergii​. 

Sean Hoban assembles the pole pruner, demonstrating to Austin Koontz, Emily Schumacher, and Jorge Jaime-Rivera how it's used.

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).