All living organisms are faced with a multitude of challenges in their natural environment, such as climate change, disease predation, competition, and habitat disturbance. In the short term, animals and plants can acclimatize to shifting environmental conditions by developing and expressing particular traits in response to local environmental conditions (phenotypic plasticity). Organisms can also react to the shifting environment by dispersing, even if such an option is not always available, for example, if the landscape is too fragmented. The last type of response is evolution via genic selection leading to adaptation. However, populations and species are going to persist in an altered environment, only if they can invoke a response.

The genome of a species contains signatures of these responses that may be studied with genetic markers. We are interested in filling gaps in the knowledge about past demographic history of organisms and which factors ultimately shape genomic variation in populations using the very latest, innovative techniques in next-generation sequencing. The incorporation of technological developments in molecular biology and the ongoing development of genomic tools, like SNPs and next-generation sequencing, and genomic-based approaches, like full genome scans and gene-expression pattern analysis, make it possible to address questions that until now were hard to tackle. There is an urgent need for empirical studies on nonmodel organisms which can contribute to the emerging disciplines of population genomics and landscape genomics. Such studies are necessary if we want to show how these advancements in molecular techniques and approaches might allow conservation genetics to make a big leap forward.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Genomic consequences of inbreeding
• Inbreeding by environment interaction
• Genomic and epigenomic consequences of outbreeding
• Genomic and epigenomic mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity
• Transcriptome, metabolomics, and proteomic techniques applied to conservation biology
• The emerging discipline of landscape genomics, detection of signature of selection using genomic techniques