Genetic variation underlies key ecological processes and economic activities, and is thus a collective resource for sustaining future species, ecosystems and human society. As biodiversity loss accelerates and environmental challenges mount, there is need for quantitative evaluation of the status and trends of genetic biodiversity. However, appropriate mathematical tools for this evaluation are lacking. Despite major recent advances in obtaining genetic data, current genetic metrics are piecemeal, may be incomparable across studies and data types, and are often collected and presented in an ad hoc manner.