July 2022

• The Tree Conservation Biology team (the Hoban lab) attended the North American Congress on Conservation Biology in Reno, Nevada. Four members will present on novel approaches to conservation and/or applied findings to help manage and recover endangered trees. Emily Schumacher “Refining Strategies for Protecting Diversity ex situ: A Case Study on Q. acerifolia, a Rare, Endangered Oak”. Kaylee Rosenberger “Species-tailored Sampling Guidelines Remain an Efficient Method to Conserve Genetic Diversity ex situ”. Emily Beckman Bruns “Developing a Metric for Optimizing an Ex situ Collection’s Mitigation of Plant Extinction Risk”. Austin Koontz “Quantifying the Impact of Genetic Markers on Measures of ex situ Conservation”. Congratulations to these four early career scientists who will share their exciting results! 
• Sean Hoban attended and helped to lead a Powell Center Working Group in partnership with the USGS.  Powell Center WGs bring together experts from multiple disciplines to tackle applied challenges relating to geography and the environment. 17 people attended the weeklong meeting to discuss how genetic data and proxy data can be mapped and analyzed at large scale and combined with geographic information to provide land management decisions, through the recently established field of macrogenetics (a new realm of science reviewed by Sean and colleagues, see this NRG article). Topics included protection of genetic diversity, predicting genetic diversity in rare species, and invasive species genetics. Participants came from NGOs, USGS, US FWS, and academia, and from five countries.  We also had a fun conservation genetic pictionary (see Twitter).