Phylogenetic diversity (PD) is a measure of the extent to which different subsets of taxa span an evolutionary tree, and provides a quantitative tool for studying biodiversity conservation. Recently, it was shown that the problem of finding subsets of taxa of given size to maximize PD can be efficiently solved by a greedy algorithm. In this paper, we extend this earlier work, beginning with a m...

Comparison of the taxonomic, phylogenetic, and trait dimensions of beta diversity may uncover the mechanisms that generate and maintain biodiversity, such as geographic isolation, environmental filtering, and convergent adaptation. We developed an approach to predict the relationship between environmental and geographic distance and the dimensions of beta diversity. We tested these predictions ...

Incorporating the evolutionary history of species into community ecology enhances understanding of community composition, ecosystem functioning and responses to environmental changes. Phylogenetic history might partly explain the impact of fragmentation and land-use change on assemblages of interacting organisms and even determine potential cascading effects across trophic levels. However, it r...

In biodiversity conservation, one is interested in selecting a subset of taxa for preservation priority. Phylogenetic diversity (PD) provides a quantitative measure for taxon selection on phylogenetic trees. In particular, PD is the total length of the minimal subtree induced by the selected taxa. Recently, it has been shown that on trees the maximal PD score and the corresponding subset of tax...

Ecologists and conservation biologists have historically used species-area and distance-decay relationships as tools to predict the spatial distribution of biodiversity and the impact of habitat loss on biodiversity. These tools treat each species as evolutionarily equivalent, yet the importance of species' evolutionary history in their ecology and conservation is becoming increasingly evident....

Phylogenetic diversity is a measure for describing how much of an evolutionary tree is spanned by a subset of species. If one applies this to the unknown subset of current species that will still be present at some future time, then this 'future phylogenetic diversity' provides a measure of the impact of various extinction scenarios in biodiversity conservation. In this paper, we study the dist...

The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function has received a great deal of attention in ecological research and recent results, from re-analyses, suggest that ecosystem function improves with increases in phylogenetic diversity. However, many of these results have been generalized across a range of different species and clades, and plants with different evolutionary histories cou...

Deforestation and forest fragmentation are known major causes of nonrandom extinction, but there is no information about their impact on the phylogenetic diversity of the remaining species assemblages. Using a large vegetation dataset from an old hyper-fragmented landscape in the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest we assess whether the local extirpation of tree species and functional impoverishment ...