Genetic diversity of north american vertebrates in protected areas

Abstract

Protected areas play a crucial role in the conservation of biodiversity; however, it is unclear if these areas have an influence on genetic diversity. As a first step towards addressing this issue, we compare the genetic diversity inside and outside of protected areas. We tested the null hypothesis that there is no difference between genetic diversity inside compared to outside of protected areas in 44 vertebrate species. By automatically skimming the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) GenBank we obtained genetic and geographical data to be repurposed and reanalysed. Novel pipelines were used to automate the process of assigning individuals to inside or outside of protected areas and then used to calculate different measures of intraspecific diversity. Forty-eight percent of examined species showed a significant difference in the amount of nucleotide diversity they contained inside compared to outside of protected areas, with similar numbers of species containing more or less genetic diversity inside compared to outside. Although our simulation testing suggests that this result is not an artefact of sampling, it is unclear what factors influence the relative amount of genetic diversity in protected areas across species.