Evolutionary distinctiveness and conservation priorities for vascular endemic plants on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Abstract

Due to the rapid loss of biodiversity and financial and human resource limitations, there is an urgent need to prioritize biodiversity conservation. Setting conservation priorities is also an important part of conservation biology. Species abundance, richness and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) ranks are the most commonly used methods for setting conservation priorities, but with the development of bioinformatics, many studies have also demonstrated the utility of incorporating phylogenetic diversity into species prioritization, with evolutionary distinctiveness (ED) and evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered (EDGE) being widely used to determine the prioritization of species for conservation, where ED measures the contribution of species to the overall evolutionary history, and EDGE considers both evolutionary distinctiveness and IUCN ranks. In this study, based on the vascular plant distribution data collected on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP), we determined the conservation priorities of plants on the QTP according to ED and EDGE2 considering four extinction risk transformations, investigated the relationship between IUCN ranks and ED, evaluated the effects of unassessed (NA) data deficiency (DD) species on EDGE rankings, and determined the conservation efficiency of the QTP conservation network in areas with evolutionary history and explored the possibility of incorporating evolutionary history into species conservation priorities. The results showed that there was no significant relationship between the ED of vascular plants and the IUCN ranks on the QTP; the results of EDGE2 showed that the top 25 species, with 14 species common to all four transformations, possessed both high ED and IUCN ranks; when EDGE2 containing DD and NA species showed that DD and NA species accounted for a large percentage of the top 25 species for all four transformations, suggesting that they may have significant potential for evolutionary history conservation; that the conservation priority areas for endemic seed plants of the QTP are located in the Hengduan Mountains, the eastern Yarlung Zangbo River, the southern Qionglai Mountains, the western Gangdise Mountains and the southern Kunlun Mountains; and that the QTP conservation networks protect the only 38.2 % of the areas rich in evolutionary history. These results emphasize the need to incorporate evolutionary information into conservation biology, but it should also be considered in conjunction with existing taxonomic diversity methods as a complementary conservation tool to provide a new perspective on the conservation of QTP plant diversity.