Inadequate funding levels are a major impediment to effective global biodiversity conservation and are likely associated with recent failures to meet United Nations biodiversity targets. Some countries are more severely underfunded than others and therefore represent urgent financial priorities. However, attempts to identify these highly underfunded countries have been hampered for decades by poor and incomplete data on actual spending, coupled with uncertainty and lack of consensus over the relative size of spending gaps. Here, we assemble a global database of annual conservation spending. We then develop a statistical model that explains 86% of variation in conservation expenditures, and use this to identify countries where funding is robustly below expected levels. The 40 most severely underfunded countries contain 32% of all threatened mammalian diversity and include neighbors in some of the world's most biodiversity-rich areas (Sundaland, Wallacea, and Near Oceania). However, very modest increases in international assistance would achieve a large improvement in the relative adequacy of global conservation finance. Our results could therefore be quickly applied to limit immediate biodiversity losses at relatively little cost.ecological/environmental policy | CBD | sustainability | foreign aid | governance

In an era of accelerated biodiversity loss and limited conservation resources, systematic prioritization of species and places is essential. In terrestrial vertebrates, evolutionary distinctness has been used to identify species and locations that embody the greatest share of evolutionary history. We estimate evolutionary distinctness for a large marine vertebrate radiation on a dated taxon-complete tree for all 1,192 chondrichthyan fishes (sharks, rays and chimaeras) by augmenting a new 610-species molecular phylogeny using taxonomic constraints. Chondrichthyans are by far the most evolutionarily distinct of all major radiations of jawed vertebrates-the average species embodies 26 million years of unique evolutionary history. With this metric, we identify 21 countries with the highest richness, endemism and evolutionary distinctness of threatened species as targets for conservation prioritization. On average, threatened chondrichthyans are more evolutionarily distinct-further motivating improved conservation, fisheries management and trade regulation to avoid significant pruning of the chondrichthyan tree of life.

Summary1. Unresolved nodes in phylogenetic trees (polytomies) have long been recognized for their influences on specific phylogenetic metrics such as topological imbalance measures, diversification rate analysis and measures of phylogenetic diversity. However, no rigorously tested, biologically appropriate method has been proposed for overcoming the effects of this phylogenetic uncertainty. 2. Here, we present a simple approach to polytomy resolution, using biologically relevant models of diversification. Using the powerful and highly customizable phylogenetic inference and analysis software beast and r, we present a semi-automated 'polytomy resolver' capable of providing a distribution of tree topologies and branch lengths under specified biological models. 3. Utilizing both simulated and empirical data sets, we explore the effects and characteristics of this approach on two widely used phylogenetic tree statistics, Pybus' gamma (c) and Colless' normalized tree imbalance (I c ). Using simulated pure birth trees, we find no evidence of bias in either estimate using our resolver. Applying our approach to a recently published Cetacean phylogeny, we observed the expected small positive bias in c and decrease in I c . 4. We further test the effect of polytomy resolution on diversification rate analysis using the Cetacean phylogeny. We demonstrate that using a birth-death model to resolve the Cetacean tree with 20%, 40% and 60% of random nodes collapsed to polytomies gave qualitatively similar patterns regarding the tempo and mode of diversification as the same analyses on the original, fully resolved phylogeny. 5. Finally, we applied the birth-death polytomy resolution approach to a large (>5000 tips), but unresolved, supertree of extant mammals. We report a distribution of fully resolved model-based trees, which should be useful for many future analysis of the mammalian supertree.

Under the impact of human activity, global extinction rates have risen a thousand times higher than shown in the fossil record. The resources available for conservation are insufficient to prevent the loss of much of the world's threatened biodiversity during this crisis. Conservation planners have been forced to prioritize their protective activities, in the context of great uncertainty. This has become known as 'the agony of choice'. A range of methods have been proposed for prioritizing species for conservation attention; one of the most strongly supported is prioritizing those species that maximize phylogenetic distinctiveness (PD). We evaluate how a composite measure of extinction risk and phylogenetic isolation (EDGE) has been used to prioritize species according to their degree of unique evolutionary history (evolutionary distinctiveness, ED) weighted by conservation urgency (global endangerment, GE). We review PD-based approaches and provide an updated list of EDGE mammals using the 2010 IUCN Red List. We evaluate how robust this method is to changes in phylogenetic uncertainty, knowledge of taxonomy and extinction risk, and examine how mammalian species that rank highly in EDGE score are representative of the collective from which they are drawn.

Halting global biodiversity loss is central to the Convention on Biological Diversity and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, but success to date has been very limited. A critical determinant of success in achieving these goals is the financing that is committed to maintaining biodiversity; however, financing decisions are hindered by considerable uncertainty over the likely impact of any conservation investment. For greater effectiveness, we need an evidence-based model that shows how conservation spending quantitatively reduces the rate of biodiversity loss. Here we demonstrate such a model, and empirically quantify how conservation investment reduced biodiversity loss in 109 countries (signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity and Sustainable Development Goals), by a median average of 29% per country between 1996 and 2008. We also show that biodiversity changes in signatory countries can be predicted with high accuracy, using a dual model that balances the effects of conservation investment against those of economic, agricultural and population growth (human development pressures). Decision-makers can use this model to forecast the improvement that any proposed biodiversity budget would achieve under various scenarios of human development pressure, and then compare these forecasts to any chosen policy target. We find that the impact of spending decreases as human development pressures grow, which implies that funding may need to increase over time. The model offers a flexible tool for balancing the Sustainable Development Goals of human development and maintaining biodiversity, by predicting the dynamic changes in conservation finance that will be needed as human development proceeds.