Natural history collections as a resource for conservation genomics: Understanding the past to preserve the future

Abstract

To avoid the worst outcomes of the current biodiversity crisis we need a deep understanding of population responses to human-induced ecological change. Rapidly expanding access to genomic resources for nonmodel taxa promises to play a unique role in meeting this goal. In particular, the increasing feasibility of sequencing DNA from historical specimens enables direct measures of population responses to the past century of anthropogenic change that will inform management strategies and refine projections of species responses to future environmental change. In this review, we discuss the methods that can be used to generate genome-scale data from the hundreds of millions of specimens housed in natural history collections around the world. We then highlight recent studies that utilize genomic data from specimens to address questions of fundamental importance to biodiversity conservation. Finally, we emphasize how traditional motivations of museum collectors, such as studies of geographic variation and community-wide inventories, provide unique opportunities for broad scale comparisons of genomic responses to anthropogenic change across time. We conclude that as sequencing technologies become increasingly accessible and more researchers take advantage of this resource, the importance of collections to the conservation of biodiversity will continue to grow.