Format: ORAL

Justin Tutt1, Jeremie B. Fant2, Kayri Havens2, Olivia G. Murrell3,4, Zoe Diaz-Martin5

1 University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA 2 Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, USA 3 Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK 4 North of England Zoological Society, Chester Zoo, Chester, UK 5 Spelman College, Atlanta, USA

If ex situ collections are to effectively conserve species, practitioners should strive to maintain genetically robust ex situ populations by (1) attaining a comprehensive understanding of the current estimates of kinship and other relevant population genetic measures and (2) making informed breeding decisions. The zoological community accomplishes these goals by using a combination of a record-based approach, where extensive documentation of mating between individuals is recorded and used to generate pedigrees, and a molecular-based approach, where individuals are genotyped to reconstruct the pedigree or fill in pedigree gaps. This raises the questions: how well do botanic gardens manage populations of exceptional plant species held across collections, and what lessons on how to manage collections can we learn and implement from the zoological community? We explore these questions and evaluate the utility of the zoo model for conservation using the charismatic arum Amorphophallus titanum, an exceptional species native to the Indonesian island of Sumatra that has been cultivated for over 130 years. In this study, we used available accession information to create a pedigree and genomic sequencing to generate a SNP-based molecular dataset. We will present our anticipated results that will compare relevant population genetic measures and pairwise kinship estimates and their subsequent recommendations of optimal breeding pairs using the record- and molecular-based datasets. We expect to observe differences between kinship coefficients calculated from each dataset and predict that the molecular-based approach will provide higher precision given notable incompleteness in accession records. To our knowledge, this is the first study to compare the record- and molecular-based approaches of managing exceptional species in botanic gardens. This work will be an important first step in improving collections management (i.e., standardizing the recording of accession data) and will highlight genomics as an effective tool when managing poorly pedigreed exceptional species.