February, 2025

Overall

• Emma and Jon Steele, the Arboretum's Research Horticulturalist, visited Vallonia Tree Seedling Nursery (southern Indiana) in late January and Oconto River Seed Orchard in February, to pick up rootstock and get a lesson in grafting. The rootstock and new skills will support ongoing conservation efforts for butternut, specifically by attempting to propagate old or sick individual trees to ensure the endurance of their genetic diversity.  At Oconto, they also toured the ~700 acre orchard including a butternut seed orchard consisting of butternuts selected for their good health.
• On February 17, Sean gave an invited presentation to the FORGENIUS project at their annual meeting in Vienna, titled “Indicators for conserving genetic diversity of trees, for biodiversity policy commitments.”  About 50 scientists as well as forest managers and restoration practitioners attended.  Sean also spent three days discussing the project progress, and visiting a black poplar (a threatened tree in Europe) genetic conservation unit which is being managed to promote more natural regeneration of poplar seedlings, in one of the only “wild” stretches of the Danube River in Austria.
  On February 20, Sean gave an invited seminar to the Conservation, Ecology and Evolution department of McGill University in Montreal, and met with students and professors for several days.  His talk was titled, “Improving the conservation of genetic diversity ex situ by integrating ecology”.  
• In mid-February we, along with the Hipp the Systematics Lab and Herbarium team, hosted 3 prospective PhD students for the University of Chicago Committee on Evolutionary Biology! 
• Sean's been traveling a lot! In late February he gave the plenary lecture at the 15th annual meeting of the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science, in Montreal. The topic of his talk was “Monitoring genetic diversity through a novel, affordable, inclusive, and scalable approach – progress and challenges”, and it covered the ‘genetic indicator’ approach that Sean and the lab have developed over the past five years, which seeks to understand the genetic health of many species with a quick, intuitive method similar to the IUCN Red List criteria. In addition to a research overview, Sean also talked about his experiences at CBD COP15 and COP16, and he gave some advice on creating policy relevant science and interacting with decision makers. Throughout the conference, he also met with dozens of students, postdocs, professors, and scientists at Canadian natural resource agencies.

Publications

• 2025. Robyn E. Shaw, Katherine A. Farquharson, Michael W. Bruford, David J. Coates, Carole P. Elliott, Joachim Mergeay, Kym M. Ottewell, Gernot Segelbacher, Sean Hoban, … [49 authors…], Cristiano Vernesi & Catherine E. Grueber. “Global meta-analysis shows action is needed to halt genetic diversity loss.” Nature. Open Access.
  • This Nature article provides the most comprehensive global picture of within-population genetic change over time for individual species, via a survey of thousands of previously published papers. It documents that ~2/3 of populations are losing genetic diversity, due to different ecological disturbances. Importantly, the study also tested and showed that conservation interventions can help slow or reverse this loss of genetic diversity. Supplementing populations and restoring connectivity between populations can improve the genetic health of species’ populations. This study was a product of six years of effort from more than 50 co-authors around the world, involving thousands of hours of data collection and curation, and was a truly a collaborative, global effort!
  • The study was covered by news articles in Nature, Science, The Independent, The Guardian, Australian Geographic, and numerous institutional news outlets (U Sydney, etc). It's been mentioned in over 120 news outlets globally!