Going viral! — uncovering the potential of viral genomic data as conservation tool by monitoring faunal population connectivity.

The genomic era has significantly enhanced our understanding of the ecology and evolution of species, inadvertently aiding the conservation and protection of target and threatened species through evidence-based policymaking. So far, most conservation measures are deployed on national or regional scales, and are mainly based on individual or population-oriented research, such as observation surveys and population genetic studies. However, these approaches lack the resolution to elucidate population dynamics on fine-grained spatial scales. To disentangle these cryptic population dynamics, and more specifically the recent and local dispersal histories of populations, we can resort to evolutionary analyses of rapidly evolving organisms (e.g., viruses) that are closely associated with our target species. In this project, I will make use of viruses as a genetic tag of their hosts – specifically two bats species (Plecotus auritus and Myotis emarginatus) – to infer their fine-scaled dispersal history (e.g., direction, velocity, frequency). The results obtained from this project will provide unprecedented insights into the population dynamics of these two bat species such as the identification of dispersal corridors and barriers. Most-importantly, these results will pave the way to a new and complementary way of monitoring faunal populations, in general, on small spatial scales, reflecting the current scales on which conservation efforts act.

Keywords:virus phylogeography, conservation genomics, bats (Chiroptera)

Disciplines:Biogeography and phylogeography, Population, ecological and evolutionary genetics, Infectious diseases, Landscape ecology, Virology