What part of the Tree of Life should we conserve
09.04.2020
Which species should we conserve now if we want to maximize biodiversity in the future - the most evolutionary distant lineages, or lineages that have so far speciated the fastest? A CIEE working group used reconstructed phylogenies to imagine which conservation decisions made millions of years ago would have maximized today’s biodiversity. Any decision made at a single point in time was ineffective, whereas under a continuously updated strategy, the best bet was conserving the fast diversifiers. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.2896 |