The Ethics of Conservation Genetics

An interdisciplinary team of researchers is exploring the technical and ethical questions of conservation genetics.

Black-footed Ferret. Photo by iStock / Kerry Hargrove
Black-footed Ferret. Photo by iStock / Kerry Hargrove

Across the globe, human activity has led to the rapid decrease in biodiversity. In just over five decades, one-third of all bird life has vanished from North America, and global wildlife population sizes have dropped nearly 70 percent. The threats here aren’t only to the plants and animals that risk erasure, but to the very fabric of humanity as we know it.

Paul Robbins
Paul Robbins

“Loss of biodiversity is an ethical threshold for human existence on this planet,” explains Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. But with recent funding from the National Science Foundation, Robbins and a team of researchers at UW–Madison are exploring intersections between conservation, genetics, ethics, and data science. “What we’re really talking about is: is it worth it to host a freezer farm filled with a genetic heritage of the Great Lakes?” asks Robbins, the project’s principal investigator.

Conservation genetics itself isn’t a new field. Defined as “the application of genetics to understand and reduce the risk of population and species extinction,” the field first gained recognition in the 1980s, then hit the mainstream in December 2020 with the birth of Elizabeth Ann, a black-footed ferret who was cloned from the cryogenically preserved cells of Willa, a black-footed ferret who died in 1988. This type of assisted population recovery is called biobanking.

Francisco Pelegri
Francisco Pelegri

While Elizabeth Ann has spurred hope for many conservationists, so, too, has she raised serious questions for others. That’s what the UW–Madison team seeks to address with their new grant. “This research will address the ethical and responsible use of a new technology with great potential to strengthen wildlife conservation,” says Francisco Pelegri, coprincipal investigator and professor of genetics in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

Per the grant proposal, a particular concern of the team is the use of these technologies “in lands currently or formerly populated by Indigenous communities.” The team is not only raising questions about the practical aspects — trapping and collecting samples — but the subsequent questions of what happens with, and who owns, the data. “The future of conservation genetics is best assured through honoring Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS),” the proposal states. 

“What we’re really talking about is: is it worth it to host a freezer farm filled with a genetic heritage of the Great Lakes?”
—Paul Robbins

Kyle Cranmer
Kyle Cranmer

With Robbins’ expertise in conservation and Pelegri’s in genetics, rounding out the project’s three pillars is Kyle Cranmer, director of the UW’s Data Science Institute. “[This project] builds very much on the strengths in genetics and the strengths of the Nelson Institute around sustainability. Managing the data, making decisions about what new samples would be most valuable, and doing all of this while honoring Indigenous Data Sovereignty is a fascinating and rewarding data science challenge,” Cranmer says.

Aerial view of the Great Lakes region. Photo by iStock / Harvepino
Aerial view of the Great Lakes region. Photo by iStock / Harvepino

The creation of the team — and the successful grant application — is due in large part to UW–Madison’s Sustainability Research Hub, a new campus service that connects faculty with similar research goals and provides project coordination for grants of all sizes. “We started with conservation and genetics, and then the questions that raises for sovereign entities and the problem of data,” Robbins says. “The Sustainability Research Hub is waiting for complicated conversations like this one.”

Annette Zimmermann
Annette Zimmermann

In fact, it was the Hub’s coordinators who suggested reaching out to faculty with expertise in ethics and philosophy to join the team. This sets the team apart from others working in this area, says Annette Zimmermann, assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy. “We have brought together people who work in the hard sciences, who work empirically, with people who think more conceptually, like me as a philosopher,” they say. Based on this interdisciplinary collaboration, the team collectively decided to place a strong emphasis on true collaboration and meaningful participation with the communities it seeks to serve. Too often, research “extracts knowledge from Indigenous communities, only then to utilize that knowledge for purposes not aligned with the goals and needs of those communities,” Zimmermann explains. “As a team, we are asking ourselves: How can we, from the get-go, create a more equitable process where researchers and their interlocutors in local communities all have a good opportunity to voice complex arguments and even tackle deep value-based controversies in a way that doesn’t follow this one-off, extractive structure?”

With the team in place, the grant will move forward on a number of initiatives, including hosting workshops and listening sessions with Indigenous communities, running biopreservation experiments, and collaboratively developing IDS principles. The big picture, however, is to lay the groundwork for technically and ethically sound research for all future conservation genetics work — and learn which conditions can make that work possible.


The Team

UW–Madison

  • Paul Robbins, environmental studies
  • Kyle Cranmer: physics computer science, statistics, data science
  • Francisco Pelegri, genetics
  • Matt Anderson, medical genetics
  • Zuzana Burivalova, forest and wildlife ecology
  • Clinton Castro, philosophy
  • Tim Van Deelen, forest and wildlife ecology
  • David Drake, forest and wildlife ecology
  • Jon Pauli, forest and wildlife ecology
  • Adena Rissman, forest and wildlife ecology
  • Sean Schoville, entomology
  • Steven Wangen, data science
  • Brian Yandell, statistics
  • Annette Zimmerman, philosophy

Partners

  • Christopher Caldwell, The College of Menominee Nation
  • Jonathan Gilbert, Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission
  • Deanne Whitworth, University of Queensland

Definitions

Biobanking: the practice of preserving biological materials like cells and tissues

Data sovereignty: a group or individual’s right to control and maintain their own data, which includes the collection, storage, and interpretation of data

Indigenous data sovereignty: the ability for Indigenous peoples to control their data and includes autonomy regarding a variety of data types such as oral traditions, DNA/genomics, community health data, etc.