Representing Hotspots of Evolutionary History in Systematic Conservation Planning for European Mammals

Abstract

Systematic conservation planning deals with cost-effective allocation of conservation funds. There are diverse ways in which evolutionary history could be included in prioritization, but here we considered it at the local scale, valuing higher the locations where the local community has high phylogenetic diversity, while still aiming at maximizing overall species representation. We conducted the prioritization with the Zonation software for spatial conservation planning.We prioritized areas for conservation in Europe using distribution data and phylogenies for 275 mammal species. We prioritized areas in Europe for conserving hotspots of evolutionary history. For comparison we made analyses with species occurrences alone. Analyses were done for the whole region and for each country separately. We explored the impacts of tree uncertainty, and analyzed how well existing protected areas performed with respect to Zonation priorities.Our findings indicate that some hotspots of evolutionary history are missed by species-based prioritization, unless specifically accounted for. Uncertainty in spatial priorities caused by variation in phylogenetic tree structure was a minor concern for prioritization. Protected areas did not perform well when assessed against the Zonation priorities for species or for phylogenetic diversity, although highest national scale priorities had almost twice as much area protected as the overall average.We emphasize that the chosen goals and analysis setups have strong impacts on spatial priorities and therefore care must be taken in defining them appropriately. But regardless of setups, the gap between the current conservation efforts and spatial prioritization outcomes is typically greater than the difference between including and excluding phylogenetic diversity. Therefore the focus should be on increasing the role of spatial analyses in practical conservation, but whenever

High exposure of global tree diversity to human pressure

“…Recent studies have highlighted the need to consider multiple biodiversity dimensions, including phylogenetic and functional diversity, and their roles in providing ecosystem services in spatial conservation planning ( 42 – 44 ). Unlike taxonomic diversity, which is still most often used in biodiversity assessments, functional and phylogenetic diversity represent critical ecological and evolutionary aspects of biodiversity not fully captured by species composition alone ( 45 – 50 ) (but see ref.…”

Area-based conservation planning in Japan: protected area network effectiveness to the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework

“…Most importantly, area-based conservation targets should not include blindly placed PAs and increased spatial percentage protection motivated by political considerations or economic efficiency (Barnes et al, 2018;Magris and Pressey, 2018). Such targets should fundamentally aim for spatially prioritized PA network planning; "quality, not quantity (size), matters" (Pimm et al, 2018) means effectively capturing representativeness, ecological connectivity, and areas of importance for biodiversity patterns that are underpinned by ecological and evolutionary processes (Klein et al, 2009;Arponen, 2012;Arponen and Zupan, 2016). Therefore, biologically oriented PA expansion is a delicate mission in social equity when balancing conservation interventions and land-use policies (Moilanen and Arponen, 2011).…”

Phylogenetic conservation prioritization with uncertainty

“…It has many causes (Donoghue and Ackerly1996;Swenson 2009;Rangel et al 2015;Nipperess 2016). Thus, uncertainty regarding the length of branches and the topology (branching pattern) of the tree can be reflected in the fact that several phylogenetic trees are plausible for a given set of species (Jetz et al 2012;Arponen and Zupan 2016;Nipperess 2016). As Collen (2015) notes, establishing how best to make robust decisions with limited and uncertain information is an important avenue of research.…”