Advanced population genetics approaches for North American bison aim to restore genetic diversity lost during the near-extinction bottleneck, improving long-term welfare and viability.
Bison genetic diversity has direct welfare implications through its role in immune function and disease resistance. Highly inbred populations show elevated disease susceptibility — particularly to bovine respiratory disease and brucellosis — requiring more intensive veterinary intervention than genetically diverse herds. Genetic rescue transfers that introduce novel alleles improve population-level immune competence within generations. The use of museum specimen DNA to recover pre-bottleneck genetic variation, while technically challenging, offers a pathway to restoring welfare-relevant genetic diversity that current living populations cannot provide.