Abstract Emerging global change stressors have underlined the importance of informing conservation decisions with molecular diversity, particularly including intraspecific adaptive or evolutionary potential across species and populations. Population-level evolutionary potential is best captured by genomic approaches, yet these data types mostly remain limited to model organisms. In contrast, traditional genetic data are broadly available. The relevance of genomic metrics, and how they differ from genetic metrics in the context of spatial conservation practices, remains unknown. This provides an opportunity to consider the relative contribution and impact of genomic compared to genetic metrics in their efficiency of selecting conservation areas of evolutionary importance. Here, we provide a guideline to include metrics of genetic and genomic variation into spatial planning analyses for multiple conservation objectives, and empirically explore how spatial prioritizations change when including different types of molecular information across multiple species. Specifically, we compare conservation solutions of scenarios including either an increase in molecular information (i.e. either a single locus; mtDNA, or several thousand loci; SNPs), or an increase in species included. We find that including less molecular information from many species leads to similar outcomes to including more molecular information from fewer species. Our work suggests that multi-species genetic data may be a cost- and time-effective surrogate for genomic data in spatial planning.

中文翻译：

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在保护规划中代表进化潜力的遗传和基因组方法的比较

摘要 新兴的全球变化压力因素强调了通过分子多样性告知保护决策的重要性，特别是包括跨物种和种群的种内适应性或进化潜力。基因组方法可以最好地捕捉种群水平的进化潜力，但这些数据类型大多仅限于模型生物。相比之下，传统的基因数据是广泛可用的。基因组指标的相关性，以及它们与空间保护实践中的遗传指标有何不同，仍然未知。这提供了一个机会，可以考虑与遗传指标相比，基因组在选择具有进化重要性的保护区的效率方面的相对贡献和影响。这里，我们提供了一个指南，将遗传和基因组变异的指标纳入多个保护目标的空间规划分析中，并根据经验探索当包括跨多个物种的不同类型的分子信息时空间优先级如何变化。具体而言，我们比较了包括增加分子信息（即单个基因座；mtDNA 或数千个基因座；SNP）或包括的物种增加在内的方案的保护解决方案。我们发现，包含来自许多物种的较少分子信息会导致与包含来自较少物种的更多分子信息类似的结果。我们的工作表明，多物种遗传数据可能是空间规划中基因组数据的一种具有成本效益和时间效益的替代品。