Quantifying the Genomic Consequences of Demographic Declines

Any population that finds itself at the brink of extinction is likely to have gone through a severe demographic decline in its recent past. The transition from traditional ancient DNA methods to palaeogenomics does not only provide a means to assess changes in genome-wide diversity across such declines, but also offers new opportunities to test additional predictions on how the genomes of declining populations evolve. The aim of this presentation is to provide an update on ongoing projects where we use a palaeogenomic approach to track how genetic parameters within species have changed across known demographic declines.