Conservation biology meets evo-devo: How understanding the emergence of variation can inform its management

Abstract

Biodiversity is facing major threats from a range of different anthropogenetic disturbances. This has driven the rise of conservation biology over the past decades to understand the factors that can mitigate or even prevent the negative effects of pressures such as habitat loss, overexploitation, climate change, and habitat degradation. Conservation biology has several success stories where it has informed management practices that protect biodiversity or ecosystems at local and regional scales (Swaisgood & Sheppard, 2010). However, many threats remain, are global in scale, and continue to increase in severity. This means that conservation biologists are facing new problems that will require solutions that merge perspectives, theory, and skills from different areas of biology. Given the often limited resources available for conservation it is urgent that implemented approaches are well informed and targeted to enhance their chances for success and long‐term management (Bejder et al., 2016; Kapos et al., 2009; Swaisgood & Sheppard, 2010). Evolutionary developmental biology (evo‐devo), which aims to understand the origins and mechanisms of variation lends itself surprising well to a central goal of conservation biology‐ the preservation of biodiversity, and often the potential for evolutionary processes to continue (Campbell et al., 2017). Losses in variation can be equated to losses in evolutionary potential and increased vulnerability to environmental change. Therefore, evo‐devo has a vast potential for application to inform the preservation of biodiversity (Campbell et al., 2017). Developmentally relevant phenomena such as phenotypic plasticity, epigenetically‐induced variation, and functional genetic mechanisms are slowly but increasingly being mentioned in discussions of conservation biology (Fox et al., 2019; Mable, 2019; Rey et al., 2019). This special issue is meant to capture a range of emerging viewpoints from biologists interested in the interface between development and conservation, and provides a collection of perspectives and empirical work that will inform and motivate the use of evo‐devo concepts and approaches in conservation biology research, to hopefully inspire our current and next generation of researchers.