A Phylogenetic Approach to Conservation: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning for a Changing Globe

Abstract

As late as the sixteenth century, the world was a matrix of primarily wild­lands. But due to technology development and population growth, humans increas­ingly altered natural habitats and modified other organisms to suit our needs. The world became “all about people”—the rest of the natural world became enslaved to us. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, calls emerged for conservation and the new field of ecology developed, resulting in legislation to form national parks and save endangered species (e.g., the Endangered Species Act in the US). This “one species at a time” approach can be credited with saving a number of individual taxa, but is insufficient to deal with the modern global biodiversity crisis given the urgent pressures on remaining natural lands. We argue that considerable expansion is needed in conservation biology, moving from the single species approach to an area based approach incorporating all species and a broad phylogenetic definition of biodiversity. Biodiversity should not be considered as just the arbitrary level at which species are named—instead it is the whole tree of life. We discuss newly developed approaches to multiple species habitat conservation plans and new spatial phylogenetic methods that take into account all levels in the tree of life when making conservation decisions. To protect biodiversity, we must use all the tools we have to identify and protect landscapes that allow for future dynamics, while considering the conditions of the past and present.