E&E Seminar Series: From DNA to Conservation Decisions: Using SNPs to Protect Threatened Species

ABSTRACT

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have become a cornerstone of modern conservation genetics, offering affordable, high-throughput genomic data that can directly inform management decisions. This talk showcases how SNP-based approaches are being applied across a range of conservation challenges, using the critically endangered Canberra Grassland Earless Dragon (Tympanocryptis lineata) as a central case study.

Genomic data can play a direct role in captive breeding programs, where kinship estimation from SNP data enables optimised breeding pair selection and minimises inbreeding. Standard measures of genetic diversity — including expected heterozygosity (He) and allelic richness (Nall) — provide essential baselines for monitoring population health, while demographic reconstruction methods reveal how population sizes have changed over evolutionary time. At the landscape scale, landscape genetic approaches link spatial and environmental features to gene flow, with optimisation tools helping to identify barriers and corridors. Environmental DNA (eDNA) methods offer a complementary, non-invasive avenue for detecting T. lineata in the field — bridging genomics and field ecology. A further challenge lies in SNP panel design: selecting a small, cost-effective subset of markers that remains informative across generations.

Together, I hope, these case studies demonstrate that SNP-based approaches have matured into practical conservation tools — relevant not only to geneticists, but to anyone making decisions about the management of threatened species.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr Bernd Gruber is a conservation geneticist at the University of Canberra with broad interests spanning population genomics, landscape ecology, and software development. His research focuses on applying genomic tools — particularly SNP-based approaches — to real-world conservation problems, from captive breeding management to landscape connectivity modelling. He is the lead developer of dartR, a widely used open-source R package ecosystem for the analysis of SNP and other genomic data in conservation and population genetics. His current work centres on the conservation genomics of Australian species, including the critically endangered Canberra Grassland Earless Dragon (Tympanocryptis lineata), and on developing optimised SNP panel design methods for long-term genetic monitoring.