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.

Figure 1.

Cumulative total number of publications containing the search term ‘supertree*’ from the ISI Web of Knowledge database.

Figure 2.

Comparison of ED values between EDGE lists. Old ED status is the value for each species as reported in Isaac et al. [28]; new ED status is the value for each species calculated in this study.

Figure 3.

Comparison of Red List status between EDGE lists. Old Red List status is the categories of species reported in [28]; new Red List status is the category of species calculated in this study, following Schipper et al. [48]. Black shading indicates where no category change has taken place. Bubble size is scaled to the number of cases of a given category, as a proportion of the species that used to be in that category in the previous version of the Red List. n = 4708 mammal species for which direct comparison could be made. DD, Data Deficient, LC, Least Concern, NT, Near Threatened, VU, Vulnerable, EN, Endangered, CR, Critically Endangered, EX/EW, Extinct/Extinct in the Wild.

Figure 4.

Comparison of EDGE ranks between EDGE lists. Rank EDGE score old is the value for each species as reported in Isaac et al. [28]; rank EDGE score new is the value for each species calculated in this study.