Mammals on the EDGE: Conservation Priorities Based on Threat and Phylogeny

By Nick J B Isaac, S. Turvey, B. Collen, C. Waterman, J. Baillie. PLoS ONE, 2007

1,018 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Conservation priority setting based on phylogenetic diversity has frequently been proposed but rarely implemented. Here, we define a simple index that measures the contribution made by different species to phylogenetic diversity and show how the index might contribute towards species-based conservation priorities. We describe procedures to control for missing species, incomplete phylogenetic resolution and uncertainty in node ages that make it possible to apply the method in poorly known clades. We also show that the index is independent of clade size in phylogenies of more than 100 species, indicating that scores from unrelated taxonomic groups are likely to be comparable. Similar scores are returned under two different species concepts, suggesting that the index is robust to taxonomic changes. The approach is applied to a near-complete species-level phylogeny of the Mammalia to generate a global priority list incorporating both phylogenetic diversity and extinction risk. The 100 highest-ranking species represent a high proportion of total mammalian diversity and include many species not usually recognised as conservation priorities. Many species that are both evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered (EDGE species) do not benefit from existing conservation projects or protected areas. The results suggest that global conservation priorities may have to be reassessed in order to prevent a disproportionately large amount of mammalian evolutionary history becoming extinct in the near future.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24694e999a4fe625ef253306426240995271710e

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Citations in the corpus

Rare Species Support Vulnerable Functions in High-Diversity Ecosystems (2013, methodology): “We adapted the Evolutionary Distinctiveness index [59,60], which measures species’ relative contributions to phylogenetic diversity, for use within a functional context.”
Invasive predators and global biodiversity loss (2016, neutral): “This analysis was restricted to extant birds (53) and mammals (54, 55) because data limitations currently prevent ED scores being calculated for reptiles and extinct taxa from all classes.”
A global assessment of endemism and species richness across island and mainland regions (2009, background): “At the same time, paleoendemic island lineages might deserve particular conservation attention, as these species are taxonomically isolated and represent a larger amount of unique evolutionary history than closely related neoendemic lineages (40).”
Phylogenetic trees do not reliably predict feature diversity (2014, background): “Maintaining this feature diversity should not only result in the greatest utilitarian benefits of biological diversity, but also contemporary evolutionary novelty (Isaac et al., 2007) and the range of potential evolution-”
Giant Clams (Bivalvia: Cardiidae: Tridacninae): A Comprehensive Update of Species and their Distribution, Current Threats and Conservation Status (2017, methodology): “The current programme has applied these metrics to major taxonomic groups such as mammals (Isaac et al. 2007, Safi et al. 2013) and amphibians (Isaac et al. 2012, Safi et al. 2013), but not to invertebrate taxa, with the exception of the Scleractinia (Huang 2012, Huang & Roy 2013).”
What are we saving? Developing a standardized approach for conservation action (2009, background): “…endangered (CR) species (n=149), all endangered (EN; n=157) and vulnerable (VU; n=291) species whose Evolutionary Distinctiveness (ED) score (Isaac et al., 2007) is above the median, as well as a stratified random sample of EN and VU species from below the median ED (n=45 and 55,…”
Phylogenetic diversity promotes ecosystem stability (2012, background): “…(Hed) that is based on the relative distribution of evolutionary distinctiveness in a community (Cadotte et al. 2010), where evolutionary distinctiveness is measured as the amount of a species’ evolutionary history that is not shared with other species (see Isaac et al. 2007, Redding et al. 2008).”