On opportunities and threats to conserve the phylogenetic diversity of Neotropical palms

Abstract

Aim Palms are an ecologically and societally important plant group, with high diversity in the Neotropics. Here, we estimated the impacts of future climate change on phylogenetic diversity (PD) of Neotropical palms under varying climatic and dispersal scenarios, assessed the effectiveness of the established network of protected areas (PAs) for conserving palms PD today and in 2070, and identified priority areas for the conservation of palm species and their evolutionary history in the face of climate change. Location Neotropics. Methods We used ecological niche modelling to estimate the distribution of 367 species in the present and for 2070 based on two greenhouse gas emission and two dispersal scenarios. We calculated Faith's PD within each five arc‐minute grid cell to evaluate the effectiveness of PAs relative to null models and used phylogenetic spatial prioritisation analysis to detect priority areas. Results We found that even under the most optimistic climatic and dispersal scenarios, the established network of PAs performed poorly in safeguarding palms PD under both current conditions and those projected for 2070. Significant losses in PD inside PAs are expected under future climate conditions, especially if species are unable to disperse to suitable areas. Nevertheless, a modest and strategic increase in the number of PAs could considerably improve the protection of palms PD in the present and 2070. Main conclusions The PD of Neotropical palms is poorly represented within the established network of PAs, at both present and in 2070. A higher realised dispersal rates would diminish PD losses inside the network of PAs. The conservation of palm PD can be improved through the expansion of PAs in strategic regions such as the upper portion of the Amazon Basin, Tropical Andes and Mesoamerica.

Environmental Drivers of Diversification and Hybridization in Neotropical Butterflies

“…Interestingly, areas with highest species richness got low phylogenetic diversity (Figure 2C, blue grids), which may be a consequence of the recent increase in diversification rate in Heliconius (4.5 Ma) and the consequent cooccurrence of multiple young species in the Amazon and foothills of the eastern Andes (Rosser et al, 2012;Kozak et al, 2015). In agreement with this observation, previous research in both animals and plants have found high phylogenetic diversity in the eastern Andes of Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador (Fenker et al, 2014;Mendoza and Arita, 2014;Guedes et al, 2018;Arango et al, 2021;Velazco et al, 2021).…”

“…To date, information on this topic is mostly based on vertebrates and plants, and suggest that the combination of high annual temperature with a constant supply of water and spatio-topographic complexity are the main predictors of species distribution, richness, and endemism (Hawkins et al, 2003;Kreft and Jetz, 2007;Qian, 2010;Vasconcelos et al, 2019). Within the Neotropics, the Amazon and the foothills of the North-eastern Andes are examples of regions that combine these conditions, and consequently, they exhibit high levels of species richness and phylogenetic diversity in monkeys, snakes, birds, amphibians, palms, and vascular plants (Kreft and Jetz, 2007;Fenker et al, 2014;Vallejos-Garrido et al, 2017;Velazco et al, 2021). Similarly, regions such as the Biogeographic Choco, Costa Rica, and the Amazon show high levels of phylogenetic endemism (e.g., Rosauer and Jetz, 2014;López-Aguirre et al, 2019;Varzinczak et al, 2020).…”

Protected area networks do not represent unseen biodiversity

“…These orders were selected because the largest and most comprehensive sets of georeferenced data are available for these orders compared with other insect groups, and because they are diverse, allowing the greatest heterogeneity of niches and ecoregions to be represented in our analyses. For each order, we downloaded occurrence data from various sources (see below), discarding species with less than 15 unique occurrences at the pixel resolution of the environmental layers 64 , 65 , a practice common in studies combining SCP and SDMs 66 , 67 . After discarding these species, 334 were randomly selected for each order, for a total of 1002 species per study area (Supplementary Table 1 ).…”

Predicting current and future global distribution of invasive Ligustrum lucidum W.T. Aiton: Assessing emerging risks to biodiversity hotspots

“…For each one, we calculated the spatial autocorrelation among filtered records based on Moran's I (Moran, 1948) and the number of filtered records. Then, we selected the set of bins with the lower quartile of the Moran's I and, of these, the one with the highest number of records (Velazco et al., 2020). The best number of bins was 50, which had a mean Moran's I of predictors of 0.447.…”

“…performed in the geographical space), but this has been demonstrated to be less efficient than the environmental one (Castellanos et al, 2019). We used an environmental filtering protocol adapted from Velazco et al (2020). This consisted of performing a principal component analysis with environmental variables (see environmental variable section) and used the first three principal components to describe environmental space where occurrences will be filtered.…”