Contents

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges for conservation biology is to provide conservation planners with ways to prioritize effort. Much attention has been focused on biodiversity hotspots1. However, the conservation of evolutionary process is now also acknowledged as a priority in the face of global change2. Phylogenetic diversity (PD) is a biodiversity index that measures the length of evolutionary pathways that connect a given set of taxa3, 4. PD therefore identifies sets of taxa that maximize the accumulation of 'feature diversity'. Recent studies, however, concluded that taxon richness is a good surrogate for PD5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Here we show taxon richness to be decoupled from PD, using a biome-wide phylogenetic analysis of the flora of an undisputed biodiversity hotspot—the Cape of South Africa. We demonstrate that this decoupling has real-world importance for conservation planning. Finally, using a database of medicinal and economic plant use10, we demonstrate that PD protection is the best strategy for preserving feature diversity in the Cape. We should be able to use PD to identify those key regions that maximize future options, both for the continuing evolution of life on Earth and for the benefit of society.

 
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Bibliographic Data

Title
Preserving the evolutionary potential of floras in biodiversity hotspots
Author
Forest, F; Richard, G; Mathieu, R; Davies, T. J; Cowling, R. M; Faith, D. P; Balmford, A; Manning, J. C; Proches, S; van der Bank, M; Reeves, G; Hedderson, T. A. J; Savolainen, V
Year
2007
Publication Type
Refereed Article
Journal
Nature
Number of pages
757-760
Volume
445
Language
en
Full Text
Available from Nature