Dear colleagues: My colleagues and I recently launched a crowdfunding effort for a turtle conservation genomics study (available here: https://experiment.com/turtle-climate-change-genes). As next-generation sequencing technologies become more affordable, we can now begin to answer challenging ecological questions about the role of adaptive genetic variation in shaping species' responses to environmental change. With that in mind, our goal is to use next-generation sequencing to quantify adaptive genetic variation in two species of turtles in Wisconsin (the Blanding's Turtle and Snapping Turtle).
This work could have real conservation implications for these two species, and can be accomplished fairly inexpensively. However, we first need to raise the funds necessary to do this work, which can be challenging as funding sources become more scarce. We feel that crowdfunding could really bridge this gap, and we have already raised over 10% of our funding goal in the past several days. However, we need to raise the remaining funds in 24 days - otherwise we do not get any of the funds at all! If you can, we would appreciate your support for this work. If you are unable to donate, sharing helps too - so please consider spreading the word about this effort! Again, you can find the project page here: https://experiment.com/turtle-climate-change-genes. All the best, -Nathan Byer
