Brad Shaffer: LA Times: Geneticists are advancing the cause of conservation with a new breed of sanctuary

“My goal is to map glaring hot spots of genetic diversity,” said Brad Shaffer, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA who has devoted more than a decade to the cause of conserving assemblages of life forms with the greatest likelihood of adapting to future climate conditions.

Now, as director of UCLA’s La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science, he leads a team of 114 researchers drawn from all 10 University of California campuses that is creating the most comprehensive genomic dataset of native species ever assembled for conservation science.