Genetic variation underlies key ecological processes and economic activities, and is thus a collective resource for sustaining future species, ecosystems and human society. As biodiversity loss accelerates and environmental challenges mount, there is need for quantitative evaluation of the status and trends of genetic biodiversity. However, appropriate mathematical tools for this evaluation are lacking. Despite major recent advances in obtaining genetic data, current genetic metrics are piecemeal, may be incomparable across studies and data types, and are often collected and presented in an ad hoc manner.

There is urgent need to conceive and develop standard, summary-level genetic indices that are robust, easily interpretable and tractable across diverse datasets. In this workshop we will develop a framework for constructing these mathematical tools. Specifically, we will: identify key attributes of successful indices in biodiversity science, survey and critique existing genetic metrics, and identify potential statistical approaches suitable for summarizing the highly dimensional nature of genetic data.We hope the workshop will inspire several synthesis papers, new collaborations, and research funding proposals for developing, evaluating and distributing new genetic indices.

The inherent challenges of our aims require integration of mathematical and computational approaches with ecology, genetics, and biodiversity science. Our workshop will help unlock the conservation potential of genomics research, and ensure that genetic and non-genetic factors are considered in quantitative fashion when evaluating and managing wild and cultivated species. More broadly, we will lay a foundation for developing new theory and approaches for describing, quantifying, and interpreting the complex, multidimensional information contained in biodiversity datasets.