Conservation organisations are concerned with the protection of natural habitats and species, for their intrinsic value, the services they provide humanity and for their amenity value. Under international and local statutes, conservation organisations are obliged to prevent wild habitats from becoming degraded and halt or reverse the decline of species of conservation concern. This job is increasingly difficult given the extent of degradation and fragmentation of habitats and the threat of global changes, such as climate change. Until now, conservationists have been mainly concerned with habitats and species, and have neglected to consider a third strand of biodiversity called 'genetic diversity'. Genetic diversity can be found in all species. It is variation among individuals in DNA sequences that cause differences in their physical attributes, and is responsible for the familial resemblance among relatives. Genetic diversity is relevant to conservation in a number of ways. Firstly, many populations of endangered species are isolated and consist of small numbers of individuals. These populations often have little genetic variation, and this can hamper their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions through natural selection. Adaptation is key to success in conservation, because without it, species will be prone to extinction under environmental changes such as climate change. Secondly, small or isolated populations often consist of closely related individuals, and mating among these close-relatives can lead to inbred offspring that suffer immediate health problems. This can act as an additional burden on endangered species, making their populations more difficult to conserve. Thirdly, similar problems can occur due to inter-mating between very divergent populations. This may occur if human-aided movement of species brings previously separated populations into contact. Although these types of genetic problems are relatively well understood, there is no generic framework for assessing which species are at risk of which genetic problems, or decision-making tools to guide management actions. In addition, conservationists may be disinclined to incorporate these genetics problems into their action plans, because jargon and terminology in genetics can make the field inaccessible to conservationists without a genetics background. Our aim in this project is to enhance dialogue and the exchange of knowledge between researchers interested in genetic biodiversity, and wildlife conservationists. In doing this we will facilitate improved strategies to conserve species and enable the best use of genetic data in conservation programmes. Firstly we will develop a working group consisting of geneticists and conservationists to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, ensuring that geneticists are aware of the key conservation challenges, and conservationists are aware of when genetic information is likely to be useful. Secondly, we will evaluate previously published genetic information to fill gaps in understanding, and to determine when genetic problems are most likely. Thirdly we will develop a mechanism to assess the risk of genetic problems faced by any individual species, and link this to a framework recommending the best course to alleviate these problems. We will then test and refine this approach using species of conservation importance in the UK. Our fourth objective will provide standard protocols for choosing the sources of individuals for human-aided movement of plants or animals from one place to another. We will develop a system for recording the success and failure of these translocations to better inform future guidelines. Finally, our key goal is to make all of this information accessible. We will produce user-friendly handbooks aimed at explaining genetic issues in conservation, and will produce web-pages to assist conservation managers develop management strategies that incorporate genetic approaches.

Cryptogams (mosses, lichens) are a conspicuous part of the ecology of alpine and higher-latitude ecosystems, and are important for cycling carbon and nutrients. In particular, how cryptogams take nitrogen from the atmosphere (N-fixation), could be of considerable importance in these systems, where nutrients are generally not easily accessible by plants and microbes. Our understanding on these processes is poor, especially in the alpine, and especially for times of the year outside of the main summer growing season. This is concerning given how climate change is disproportionally effecting higher latitude, higher elevation, ecosystems, and through changing snow-cover, affecting winter strongly. This also means that understanding the role cryptogams plays in global climate modelling is not well resolved, and in ecosystem where they are abundant, this is a shortcoming. Cryptogams also have a diverse microbial community inhabiting the aboveground parts. As part of a complex microbial food web, this includes photosynthesising organisms and microbes that can fix atmospheric nitrogen. Currently, we have little information on the molecular ecology of these communities, and if the structure and function of the microbe-cryptogam system varies over time, and amongst different cryptogams. To understand this, and how alpine cryptogams function over time and in response to changing energy and nutrient availability, we will study four different species of cryptogams in our fieldsite in the Cairngorms of eastern Scotland. In this sub-arctic alpine environment, we will measure how C and N are captured and cycled by cryptogams, measure for the first time how these processes occur under snow, and track the fate of C and N into soils. We will use shading methods to change how C enters to the system, allowing us to determine how cryptogams change their nutrient cycling under altered energy availability. Together, these investigations will help us better model how these ecosystems under a changing climate, and increase our understanding of the ecology of the cryptogamosphere.

Natural history specimen collections, such as those curated in museums and herbaria across the UK, are invaluable resources for bioscience research, representing an enormous labor effort over decades and centuries, used to create an archive of millions of physical specimens identified to the highest standard. Digitization of these specimens, including of DNA sequences commonly used in molecular genetic and ecological research, would hugely improve their accessibility to the wider biological community, improving by orders of magnitude the species diversity represented in public sequence databases. This will greatly improve our ability to detect and understand organisms and gene sequences relevant to the BBSRC remit, including agricultural pests, crop cultivars, pollinators, parasites, vectors of pathogens, and remains of ancient peoples. However, the vast majority of these specimens were preserved prior to the molecular era, and as such the condition of DNAs in these specimens is poor - fragmented to <100 base-pairs, and chemically damaged, making them impossible to access using popular techniques such as "DNA barcoding". Short read sequencing provides a solution to this quandry through economic brute force - we are now able to sequence over a billion DNA bases for circa £5-10. In particular, we are now able to "skim-read" the genome for a total economic cost of £20-30/specimen, generating high-quality sequences of markers of high relevance in species identification such as mitochondrial and chloroplast genomes and ribosomal DNA. Deeper sequencing of these specimens can also be used to call population variants or mine for specific nuclear sequences of relevance in biomedicine and agriculture. This award will allow the Natural History Museum to purchase instruments enabling our molecular labs to offer the world's first specialist service for "genome skimming" of historical specimens, receiving tissue specimens from users and returning data for under £30/specimen. We will rely on the instruments this award funds to achieve this vision in two ways. Firstly, user-friendly liquid handling/automation instruments will act as a "force multiplier" for a lab technician, enabling several 100s of specimens to be processed in the time that it would take to process a few 10s of specimens manually. These instruments, which dispense sustainably and economically with dramatically lower use of disposable plasticware, would also enable us to cut the volume of sequencing library prep reactions, reducing this cost to a few £/specimen. Secondly, we would sequence the samples in-house, using special read formats appropriate to the highly fragmented nature of historical DNA, on a new generation of sequencing instruments. These deliver field-leading accuracy and cost-per-base (for us, circa £10/skim), at a purchase cost ca. 1/4 that of high-throughput instruments used in specialist centres. With 5 project partners from some of the UK's most prominent natural history collections, we will apply this service to skim 1000s of specimens in the first year of operation, before opening to general submission. This service, building on the NHM's expertise with these challenging templates, will render molecular sequences from historical samples (all deposited publicly by default) accessible to a wide audience of comparative and applied biologists.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.