Biodiversity Conservation and Phylogenetic Systematics: Preserving our evolutionary heritage in an extinction crisis [Paperback]

This book is about phylogenetic diversity as an approach to reduce biodiversity losses in this period of mass extinction. Chapters in the first section deal with questions such as the way we value phylogenetic diversity among other criteria for biodiversity conservation; the choice of measures; the loss of phylogenetic?diversity with extinction; the importance of organisms that are deeply branched in the tree of life, and the role of relict species. The second section is composed by contributions exploring methodological aspects, such as how to deal with abundance, sampling effort, or conflicting trees in analysis of phylogenetic?diversity. The last section is devoted to applications, showing how phylogenetic diversity can be integrated in systematic conservation planning, in EDGE and HEDGE evaluations. This wide coverage makes the book a reference for academics, policy makers and stakeholders dealing with biodiversity conservation.

Phylogenetics and conservation biology: drawing a path into the diversity of life.- The value of phylogenetic diversity.- The PD phylogenetic diversity framework: linking evolutionary history to feature diversity for biodiversity conservation.- Reconsidering the loss of evolutionary history: how does non-random extinction prune the tree-of-life?- Phylogenetics and conservation in New Zealand: the long and the short of it.- What is the meaning of extreme phylogenetic diversity? The case of phylogenetic relict species.- Using phylogenetic dissimilarities among sites for biodiversity assessments and conservation.- Phylogenetic diversity measures and their decomposition: a framework based on hill numbers.- Split diversity: measuring and optimizing biodiversity using phylogenetic split networks.- The rarefaction of phylogenetic diversity: formulation, extension and application.- Support in area prioritization using phylogenetic information.- Assessing hotspots of evolutionary history with data from multiple phylogenlƒy