I-HEDGE: determining the optimum complementary sets of taxa for conservation using evolutionary isolation.

ABSTRACT: In the midst of the current biodiversity crisis, conservation efforts might profitably be directed towards ensuring that extinctions do not result in inordinate losses of evolutionary history. Numerous methods have been developed to evaluate the importance of species based on their contribution to total phylogenetic diversity on trees and networks, but existing methods fail to take complementarity into account, and thus cannot identify the best order or subset of taxa to protect. Here, we develop a novel iterative calculation of the heightened evolutionary distinctiveness and globally endangered metric (I-HEDGE) that produces the optimal ranked list for conservation prioritization, taking into account complementarity and based on both phylogenetic diversity and extinction probability. We a

SUBMITTER: Jensen EL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5012326 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature