Should evolutionary history guide conservation?

The Future of Phylogenetic Systematics in Conservation Biology: Linking Biodiversity and Society

“…As the entire operation demanded a long time and effort of specialists, the extent to which the later stage of the process -calculations of phylogenetic diversity -provided additional information "worth waiting for" was a recurrent and important question. Stopping at the fi rst step and using species richness was accepted as a good proxy of biodiversity and sometimes justifi ed, as when phylogenetic trees were expected to be balanced, or when the species with higher values of phylogenetic diversity were widespread , so not bringing important additional information (Rodrigues et al 2005 ;Hartmann and André 2013 ). This rationale involved an unfortunate circular reasoning in that it required the knowledge about the phylogeny of the group to be able to discard it.…”

Biodiversity Conservation and Phylogenetic Systematics

“…As the entire operation demanded a long time and effort of specialists, the extent to which the later stage of the process -calculations of phylogenetic diversity -provided additional information "worth waiting for" was a recurrent and important question. Stopping at the fi rst step and using species richness was accepted as a good proxy of biodiversity and sometimes justifi ed, as when phylogenetic trees were expected to be balanced, or when the species with higher values of phylogenetic diversity were widespread , so not bringing important additional information Hartmann and André 2013 ). This rationale involved an unfortunate circular reasoning in that it required the knowledge about the phylogeny of the group to be able to discard it.…”

“…This book is organized around three main themes: questions, methods and applications. We hope that this concentrated effort will contribute to May 1990 ;Pavoine et al 2005 ;Redding and Mooers 2006 ;Steel et al 2007 ;Lozupone and Knight 2005 ;Rosauer et al 2009 ; Comparison of phylogenetic measures Schweiger et al 2008 ;Pio et al 2011 Comparison of phylogenetic diversity to traditional measures Polasky et al 2002 ;Rodrigues et al , 2011Hartmann and André 2013 Inclusion of phylogenetics in systematic conservation planning Walker and Faith 1994 ;Arponen 2012 Prioritization of areas for the conservation of evolutionary history the emergence of new solutions and attitudes towards a more effective preservation of our evolutionary heritage.…”

“…During the last two decades several metrics have been developed to assess the phylogenetic diversity of clades and to evaluate and compare communities for conservation based on the phylogenetic diversity of the species they harbour (e.g., . Despite the diffi culty of defi ning the most adequate metric (see Schweiger et al 2008 ), and the circumstances where phylogenetics can be useful for conservation (e.g., Hartmann and Andre 2013 ), two points emerged from these studies. The fi rst is that conservation strategies based on phylogenetic measures capture more evolutionary diversity than strategies ignoring phylogeny (e.g., , and the second is that extinctions are not random in the tree of life, but rather are phylogenetically and functionally clumped Yessoufou et al 2012 ).…”

Phylogenetics and Conservation Biology: Drawing a Path into the Diversity of Life

“…This book is organized around three main themes: questions, methods and applications. We hope that this concentrated effort will contribute to Vane-Wright et al 1991 ;May 1990 ;Faith 1992 ;Posadas et al 2001 ;Pavoine et al 2005 ;Redding and Mooers 2006 ;Isaac et al 2007 ;Steel et al 2007 ;Hartmann and Steel 2007 ;Lozupone and Knight 2005 ;Rosauer et al 2009 ;Cadotte and Davies 2010 ;Chao et al 2010 Comparison of phylogenetic measures Schweiger et al 2008 ;Davies and Cadotte 2011 ;Pio et al 2011 Comparison of phylogenetic diversity to traditional measures Polasky et al 2002 ;Rodrigues and Gaston 2002 ;Rodrigues et al 2005Rodrigues et al , 2011Hartmann and André 2013 Inclusion of phylogenetics in systematic conservation planning Walker and Faith 1994 ;Arponen 2012 Prioritization of areas for the conservation of evolutionary history Posadas et al 2001 ;Lehman 2006 ;McGoogan et al 2007 ;López-Osorio and Miranda-Esquivel 2010 ;Forest et al 2007 ;Buerki et al 2015 ;Pollock et al 2015 ;Zupan et al 2014 Prioritization of species Weitzman 1998 ;Isaac et al 2007 ;Kuntner et al 2011 ;Redding et al 2015 Relationship between extinctions and the loss of phylogenetic diversity Nee and May 1997 ;Purvis 2008 ;…”