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Conserving Phylogenetic Diversity Can Be a Poor Strategy for Conserving Functional Diversity.

Florent Mazel1, Arne O Mooers1, Giulio Valentino Dalla Riva2

  • 1Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby BC V5A 1S6, Canada.

Systematic Biology
|June 9, 2017
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Summary

Conserving species to maximize phylogenetic diversity (PD) may not reliably preserve functional diversity (FD). Prioritizing PD may sometimes result in less functional diversity than random selection, raising concerns for conservation strategies.

Keywords:
Conservationevolutionary diversityfunctional diversityspecies prioritizationtrait evolution

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Area of Science:

  • Ecology
  • Evolutionary Biology
  • Conservation Biology

Background:

  • Academic biologists have long recommended prioritizing the conservation of phylogenetically diverse species assemblages.
  • The primary argument is that conserving phylogenetic diversity (PD) will also conserve functional diversity (FD), which is valuable for ecosystem stability and services.
  • Current methods often assume that maximizing PD will inherently maximize FD, typically by examining phylogenetic signal in traits.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To evaluate the effectiveness of using phylogenetic diversity (PD) to conserve functional diversity (FD) in conservation.
  • To directly compare the functional diversity of PD-maximized species assemblages with randomly selected assemblages.
  • To investigate the influence of trait evolution models and tree shapes on the relationship between PD and FD.

Main Methods:

  • Simulated trait evolution under various models and tree shapes.
  • Directly compared the functional diversity (FD) of a set of taxa that maximized phylogenetic diversity (PD) against a random set of the same size.
  • Assessed the impact of different evolutionary models and phylogenetic structures on conservation outcomes.

Main Results:

  • Conserving the PD-maximized set of taxa generally conserved more FD than a random set under many common models.
  • However, this outcome is not universal and cannot be generalized across all models of trait evolution and tree shapes.
  • Under biologically plausible scenarios, maximizing PD can lead to less FD compared to random selection, even with significant phylogenetic signal in traits.

Conclusions:

  • Measuring phylogenetic signal in traits is insufficient for assessing the efficacy of PD in conserving FD.
  • The utility of PD as a conservation prioritization metric is questionable, as it does not reliably ensure the conservation of functional diversity.
  • Conservation strategies aiming to maintain trait diversity face challenges when relying solely on maximizing phylogenetic diversity due to complex interactions between evolutionary models and tree shapes.