Conservation prioritization of the northern hills of Uruguay based on the intra-specific phylogenetic diversity of frogs and lizards

Abstract

Conservation biology has traditionally applied a range of species-level criteria to prioritize areas for biodiversity protection. However, intraspecific genetic data can be more effective for prioritization than species-level approaches at small spatial scales. Phylogenetic diversity can be used for area prioritization based on intra-specific genealogies of multiple, co-distributed species. In this study, we evaluated the intra-specific phylodiversity of four co-distributed frogs and lizards in the northern hills of Uruguay (‘Quebradas del Norte’, QDN). There was strong congruence in PD patterns among species, which supported ‘Tres Cruces’ (TCS) as the best-ranked drainage in general, and as the best complement to the phylodiversity already protected in the QDN. Congruent PD patterns across species at our small spatial scale (∼3850 km2) suggest limited dispersal abilities and strong habitat preferences in all four species. In addition, the partitioning of PD within and between drainages separated ‘Tacuarembó Grande/Cuñapirú’ (TGC) as the most distinct from the other drainages. There was a clear north-east to south-west gradient of increasing natural land cover across drainages, where TCS had intermediate values of anthropization and a higher contribution of native forest, while anthropized habitats covered a higher proportion of the TGC drainage with an important contribution of forestry plantations. Our prioritizations of TCS and TGC are consistent with previous species-level assessments of land vertebrates and woody plants in the QDN. We encourage the use of the R package ‘areaPD’ (github.com/arleyc/areaPD) to analyze phylogeographic data from multiple, co-distributed species and to apply a comparative PD approach for area prioritization.