Wild soybean (Glycine soja Sieb. et Zucc) is the most important germplasm resource for soybean breeding, and is currently subject to habitat loss, fragmentation and population decline. In order to develop successful conservation strategies, a total of 604 wild soybean accessions from 43 locations sampled across its range in China, Japan and Korea were analyzed using 20 nuclear (nSSRs) and five chloroplast microsatellite markers (cpSSRs) to reveal its genetic diversity and population structure. Relatively high nSSR diversity was found in wild soybean compared with other self-pollinated species, and the region of middle and lower reaches of Yangtze River (MDRY) was revealed to have the highest genetic diversity. However, cpSSRs suggested that Korea is a center of diversity. High genetic differentiation and low gene flow among populations were detected, which is consistent with the predominant self-pollination of wild soybean. Two main clusters were revealed by MCMC structure reconstruction and phylogenetic dendrogram, one formed by a group of populations from northwestern China (NWC) and north China (NC), and the other including northeastern China (NEC), Japan, Korea, MDRY, south China (SC) and southwestern China (SWC). Contrib analyses showed that southwestern China makes the greatest contribution to the total diversity and allelic richness, and is worthy of being given conservation priority.

Summary: Seed size and dormancy are reproductive traits that interact as adaptations to environmental conditions. Here, we explore the evolution of these traits in environments that differ in overall mean favorability and in the extent of temporal predictability. Our model simulates a population of annual plants living in a range of environments that differ in aridity, namely mean annual precipitation and inter‐annual variation of this mean precipitation. The optimal fitness curve is investigated assuming density dependence, three alternative hypothetical relationships between seed mass and seed survival in the soil (negative, positive, and independent of mass), and three alternative relationships between survival in soil and precipitation (strong and intermediate negative relationships, and no relationship). Our results show that seed size and dormancy are not two substitutable evolutionary traits; that specific combinations of these two traits are selected in environments that differ in favorability and temporal predictability; that a certain degree of seed dormancy is advantageous not only in temporally unpredictable environments but also in temporally predictable environments with high competition; and that more than one combination of seed size and dormancy (defined in terms of germination fraction) can be optimal, even in spatially homogeneous environments, potentially allowing selection for more variation in these traits within and among species.

There is an urgent need for a new conservation approach as mere designation of protected areas, the primary approach to conserving biodiversity, revealed its low conservation efficiency and inability to cope with numerous challenges faced by nature in the Anthropocene. The paper discusses the new concept, which proposes that ecological restoration becomes an integral part of conservation planning and implementation, and is done using threatened plant species that are introduced not only into locations where they currently grow or grew in the recent past, but also into suitable locations within their potential distribution range. This new concept is called conservation-oriented restoration to distinguish it from the traditional restoration. Although the number of restoration projects focusing on recreation of once existing natural habitats is instantly growing, the majority of ecological restoration projects, in contrast to conservation-oriented restoration, have predominantly utilitarian goals, e.g. improvement or air quality, erosion control or soil replenishment. Conservation-oriented restoration should not be seen as an alternative either to the latter, or to the conservation dealing with particular threatened species (species-targeted conservation). These three conservation approaches, traditional ecological restoration, species-targeted conservation, and conservation-oriented restoration differ not only in broadly defined goals and attributes of their targets, but also in the types of ecosystems they are applicable to, and complement each other in combating global deterioration of the environment and biodiversity loss.

Historical processes during the Quaternary are likely to have left a signature on the geographical distribution of intraspecific genetic variation. In particular, high genetic uniqueness could be expected within glacial refugia for multiple species. We aimed to test this for plants in China and whether multi-species hotspots of genetic diversity are good indicators of glacial refugia in this region. From chloroplast DNA haplotype data for 116 species we calculated two local genetic diversity metrics for each species: haplotype genetic richness and genetic uniqueness. From these two, only uniqueness could reliably identify refugia, whereas richness may indicate either glacial refugia or areas recolonized by genetic lineages from different refugia in the postglacial period. Our results suggest the occurrence of numerous cryptic refugia and their likely importance in the maintenance and evolution of the Chinese flora, and indicate that an approach that locates geographic hotspots of genetic diversity data can reliably identify refugia.