Integrating biogeography, threat and evolutionary data to explore extinction crisis in the taxonomic group of cycads.

ABSTRACT: Will the ongoing extinction crisis cause a severe loss of evolutionary information accumulated over millions of years on the tree of life? This question has been largely explored, particularly for vertebrates and angiosperms. However, no equivalent effort has been devoted to gymnosperms. Here, we address this question focusing on cycads, the gymnosperm group exhibiting the highest proportion of threatened species in the plant kingdom. We assembled the first complete phylogeny of cycads and assessed how species loss under three scenarios would impact the cycad tree of life. These scenarios are as follows: (1) All top 50% of evolutionarily distinct (ED) species are lost; (2) all threatened species are lost; and (3) only all threatened species in each IUCN category are lost. Finally, we analy

SUBMITTER: Yessoufou K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5395460 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature