Investing in evolutionary history: implementing a phylogenetic approach for mammal conservation

Abstract

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.

The conservation status of the world’s reptiles

“…Threat levels have been reported in this way in similar studies (e.g., Clausnitzer et al, 2009;Hoffmann et al, 2010;Schipper et al, 2008), representing the current consensus among conservation biologists about how the proportion of threatened species should be presented, while also accounting for the uncertainty introduced by DD species. The approach is likely to result in a conservative estimate of threat proportions, since Data Deficient reptiles are often rare and restricted in range, thus likely to fall within a threatened category in future based on additional data [although in other taxa, indications are that DD species will often fall into Least Concern categories (e.g., birds; Butchart and Bird, 2010) or remain largely Data Deficient (e.g., mammals; Collen et al, 2011)]. Overall, the re-assessment of DD species into different categories is very taxon-specific and depends greatly on the attitude of the assessor to risk, so that it is difficult to make any generalisations about what the future status of DD species might be.…”

The PD Phylogenetic Diversity Framework: Linking Evolutionary History to Feature Diversity for Biodiversity Conservation

“…ED ("evolutionary distinctiveness"; Isaac et al 2007 ; see also Collen et al 2011 ) divides up the total PD among all species on the given phylogeny. This provides a fi xed score for each species, refl ecting its contribution to the total evolutionary history (PD).…”

The future of evolutionary diversity in reef corals

“…A number of different ED metrics are currently available [16,17], each highlighting somewhat different aspects of the evolutionary process, but empirical analyses of how the loss of a given set of species affects different metrics remain scarce [18]. This hampers our ability to understand the behaviour of these metrics in real-world situations and also impedes the development of guidelines for their use in risk assessment [19].…”