Phylogenetic measures of biodiversity and neo- and paleo-endemism in Australian Acacia.

Brent D Mishler,Joseph T Miller,Andrew H Thornhill,Nunzio Knerr,Carlos E González-Orozco,Shawn W Laffan

doi:10.1038/ncomms5473

Abstract

Understanding spatial patterns of biodiversity is critical for conservation planning, particularly given rapid habitat loss and human-induced climatic change. Diversity and endemism are typically assessed by comparing species ranges across regions. However, investigation of patterns of species diversity alone misses out on the full richness of patterns that can be inferred using a phylogenetic approach. Here, using Australian Acacia as an example, we show that the application of phylogenetic methods, particularly two new measures, relative phylogenetic diversity and relative phylogenetic endemism, greatly enhances our knowledge of biodiversity across both space and time. We found that areas of high species richness and species endemism are not necessarily areas of high phylogenetic diversity or phylogenetic endemism. We propose a new method called categorical analysis of neo- and paleo-endemism (CANAPE) that allows, for the first time, a clear, quantitative distinction between centres of neo- and paleo-endemism, useful to the conservation decision-making process.

Highlights

Understanding spatial patterns of biodiversity is critical for conservation planning, given rapid habitat loss and human-induced climatic change
Phylogenetic measures of biodiversity were pioneered by Faith[11], who developed the concept of phylogenetic diversity (PD), which has been increasingly explored in recent years[12,13,14,15]
While PD is significantly related to species richness (SR), there is still reasonable scatter (r2 1⁄4 0.876; Supplementary Fig. 2), and no sign of a plateau at the highest levels of richness found in this study

Summary

Introduction

Understanding spatial patterns of biodiversity is critical for conservation planning, given rapid habitat loss and human-induced climatic change. Biodiversity is most often studied solely at the species level, which misses both the full richness of patterns that can be inferred from the full tree of life, and the analytical power that comes from a phylogenetic approach. Rather than being species-centric, should be more broadly defined to mean ‘the geographic rarity of that portion of a phylogenetic tree found in a given area’. This phylogenetically based definition encompasses clades that are at the traditional species level, and takes into account clades larger than or smaller than named species, and so provides a more complete picture of endemism. PE for a region is the length of a branch multiplied by the proportion of its range which occurs in that region (the inverse of the range for a single-cell case), summed over all the branches found in that region, just as species endemism (WE) for a region is one multiplied by the proportion of a species’ range which occurs in that region, summed over all species in the region[16]

Objectives

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Results

Conclusion