Linking epigenetics and biological conservation: Towards a conservation epigenetics perspective

Abstract

Biodiversity conservation is a global issue where the challenge is to integrate all levels of biodiversity to ensure the long‐term evolutionary potential and resilience of biological systems. Genetic approaches have largely contributed to conservation biology by defining “conservation entities” accounting for their evolutionary history and adaptive potential, the so‐called evolutionary significant units (ESUs). Yet, these approaches only loosely integrate the short‐term ecological history of organisms. Here, we argue that epigenetic variation, and more particularly DNA methylation, represents a molecular component of biodiversity that directly links the genome to the environment. As such, it provides the required information on the ecological background of organisms for an integrative field of conservation biology. We synthesize knowledge about the importance of epigenetic mechanisms in (a) orchestrating fundamental development alternatives in organisms, (b) enabling individuals to respond in real‐time to selection pressures and (c) improving ecosystem stability and functioning. Using practical examples in conservation biology, we illustrate the relevance of DNA methylation (a) as biomarkers of past and present environmental stress events as well as biomarkers of physiological conditions of individuals; (b) for documenting the ecological structuring/clustering of wild populations and hence for better integrating ecology into ESUs; (c) for improving conservation translocations; and (d) for studying landscape functional connectivity. We conclude that an epigenetic conservation perspective will provide environmental managers the possibility to refine ESUs, to set conservation plans taking into account the capacity of organisms to rapidly cope with environmental changes, and hence to improve the conservation of wild populations. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

A river runs through it: The causes, consequences, and management of intraspecific diversity in river networks

“…By introducing the C INDEX (Prunier et al, 2019), we aimed to tackle a number of technical issues stemming from the indirect quantification of barrier effects from genetic data, although we readily acknowledge that further developments are still needed to make it a fully operational tool. We notably plan to take into account the role of asymmetric gene flow (Paz‐Vinas et al, 2015) and to improve both spatial and temporal resolutions of the C INDEX by considering the use of genomic and epigenetic markers (Rey et al, 2020). We strongly encourage other researchers to build on this groundwork or to follow their own lines of research in order to move toward fully operational conservation measures based on the analysis of intraspecific diversity.…”

Application of the MSAP Technique to Evaluate Epigenetic Changes in Plant Conservation

“…The importance of cytosine methylation relies on the fact that it has been associated with numerous biological processes, such as genomic imprinting, transcriptional regulation of genes and transposable elements and gene silencing [ 13 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. Besides, DNA methylation is considered sensitive to the environment and is involved in the plasticity and adaptative responses to changing environments [ 19 ]. Modifications of DNA methylation patterns can appear as a response of changing environments, producing “environmentally induced phenotype variation”, but may also arise spontaneously as “stochastic phenotype variation” [ 19 , 20 ].…”

“…Besides, DNA methylation is considered sensitive to the environment and is involved in the plasticity and adaptative responses to changing environments [ 19 ]. Modifications of DNA methylation patterns can appear as a response of changing environments, producing “environmentally induced phenotype variation”, but may also arise spontaneously as “stochastic phenotype variation” [ 19 , 20 ]. Although epigenetic modifications can be reset between generations [ 21 ], some of them, especially those involving DNA methylation, may not be reset, resulting in a transgenerational stability of these markers [ 11 ].…”

Genetic erosion reduces biomass temporal stability in wild fish populations

“…Future studies are now needed to confirm the significance of these results in other taxa and other ecosystems and to disentangle the relative contribution of intra-and interspecific diversity in explaining biomass production in the wild (23), notably in temperate ecosystems where species diversity is naturally low. Our findings yet also strongly suggest that the impact of human-induced genetic erosion on natural ecosystems’ capacity to provide critical provisioning and regulating services to humanity is probably much more important than anticipated, making it a critical conservation issue and stressing the need for human societies to adopt prominent environmental policies favoring all facets of biodiversity (71, 72).…”