Taking genetics into the field: reflections from my conservation sabbatical

30 September 2026

After seven years of balancing research with senior management responsibilities, I felt the need to reconnect more directly with the practice of conservation. I wanted not simply to work with conservation organisations as an academic partner, but to experience their work from within: to better understand the questions they face, the decisions they have to make and where research can genuinely help. I was fortunate to be given a research-focused sabbatical that allowed me to do exactly that. 

Over the past months, I have become part of the day-to-day work of Project Biodiversity, a conservation NGO in Cabo Verde, while also working closely with several other organisations across the country and beyond. This has meant moving between research, field conservation, organisational discussions, training and the practical problems that conservation teams encounter every day. 

It has been an extremely useful change of perspective. As researchers, we often start with a scientific question and then ask how the answer might contribute to conservation. Working much more closely with NGOs has encouraged me to reverse that process: to start with the problems conservation practitioners are trying to solve and ask whether genetics, genomics or other emerging technologies can genuinely help. 

Sometimes the questions are surprisingly basic. If meat from a protected species is confiscated, can we identify which species it came from? Can we determine where an animal originated as climate change causes species distributions to shift? In sea turtle conservation, can we obtain information about populations, disease or the sex of hatchlings without relying on methods that are expensive, invasive or impractical for NGOs working in the field? 

These conversations have also reinforced something I have increasingly felt in my research: conservation genomics needs to move beyond simply describing genetic diversity. This is leading us towards what I have started to think of as precision conservation. 

The idea borrows deliberately from precision medicine. In medicine, biomarkers are increasingly used to provide information about an individual, such as its condition, susceptibility to disease or likely response to treatment. In conservation, we could begin to develop a similar toolkit of molecular biomarkers that provides information about characteristics that are otherwise difficult to measure. And our work is already beginning to show what this might look like. We are developing molecular approaches that can provide information about the geographic origin of animals, exposure to infection and other aspects of their biology, simply from a blood sample and DNA methylation sequencing. In sea turtles, we are also working towards biomarkers that could identify the sex of hatchlings. This is particularly important in species where sex is determined by incubation temperature, and where climate change can skew sex ratios so strongly that, in some populations, the production of one sex could become increasingly rare. Yet the sex of a hatchling cannot be identified externally when it emerges from the nest without sacrificing them. 

None of these tools is useful simply because the technology is sophisticated. Their value depends on whether they answer a real conservation question, whether they can eventually become affordable and practical, and whether conservation organisations can use the information to make better decisions. 

That may be the most important lesson of my sabbatical. Spending time embedded within conservation organisations has not taken me away from genetics and genomics. It has made me think much more carefully about where they can make a difference. For me, that is increasingly where the most interesting science begins.

- Professor Christophe Eizaguirre

MSc Biodiversity and Conservation