Table 1.

Examples of evolutionary principles applied to various conservation strategies

Conservation context	Evolutionary application and goal	References
Management of small, endangered populations	Genetic rescue from inbreeding depression through outbreeding	Westemeier et al. (1998); Pimm, Dollar, and Bass (2017); Frankham (2015)
	Evolutionary rescue via standing or de novo genetic variation
Captive breeding programs	Minimizing of rapid adaptation to captivity	Fraser (2008); Bowlby and Gibson (2011); Christie et al. (2012)
Demographic rescue
Reintroduction programs	Adaptive matching of source populations	Lesica and Allendorf (1999); Houde et al. (2015)
Interactions between domesticated and wild species	Mitigating gene flow between domesticated escapees and wild populations	Hindar et al. (2006); Hutchings and Fraser (2008)
Sustainable harvesting, populations	Reducing selectivity (e.g., harvesting of faster growing, later maturing individuals) to avoid undesirable genetic changes to various traits	Heino et al. (2015); Kuparinen and Festa‐Bianchet (2017)
Sustainable harvesting, ecosystems	Reducing selectivity in harvesting to reduce undesirable changes to trophic cascades, communities and ecosystems	Palkovacs et al. (2018)
Endangered species legislation, and designation of conservation units below the species level	Conserving populations harboring unique adaptive characteristics to increase species’ evolutionary potential	Waples (1995); Funk et al. (2012)
Species climate change adaptation	Identifying traits which facilitate or limit adaptive responses to climate change	Donelson, Wong, Booth, and Munday (2016); Schunter et al. (2018)
	Determining the significance of transgenerational plasticity for responses to climate change

Some conservation strategies focus more on adaptive state and others more on adaptive process (Figure 1b), though these goals are not mutually exclusive in many instances.