National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

First Meeting August 15 – 22, 1999

Phylogeny & Conservation: measuring biodiversity, predicting extinction and invasions, and other practical uses of evolutionary patterns

The first meeting of the ‘Phylogeny and Conservation’ Working Group should be broad, setting the agenda that will include the interests and diverse approaches of the entire group. Our general goals during this week are as follows: (1) Meet one another and learn about our mutual interests in conservation biology; (2) create productive dialogues; (3) establish subgroups that will form long-term working research units; (4) create a website with an interactive coordinator; (5) develop a common data set that the Group can access, contribute to, and analyze.

Here’s our general plan for the week. It is only tentative and is open to change depending on how things go:

Sunday, 15 August

Morning (8:30am, or some approximation)

Overview- introductions of who we are, what interests us, and goals for the Working Group. This will be informal and mainly focused on learning about what we do. Please come prepared to interact.

Afternoon

Meet, talk and drink with paleo Group.

Monday, 16 August

Morning

General roundtable discussion of:

(1) What is ‘biodiversity’?

(2) How to measure biodiversity?

(3) Can we usefully quantify biodiversity for conservation purposes?

(4) Is phylogeny useful in predicting extinction and species invasions?

Discussion points may include: What kinds of characters (genetic, phenotypic, functional) are meaningful measures of biodiversity? How can phylogenies be used to quantify character diversity? What traits are phylogenetically clustered that cause nonrandom taxonomic patterns of extinction and invasion?

Afternoon

Meet as a group to describe different ways of using phylogenies to measure biodiversity and to use phylogeny in predicting extinction and invasions. How are traits such as geographic range, body size and niche breadth phylogenetically distributed?

Discussion points might include: Quality and quantity of phylogenies; methods for assessing phylogenies (e.g., balance; resolution). Outline analytical procedures evaluating how phylogenies are useful in terms of biodiversity and conservation (e.g., root weight; higher-taxon richness; spanning-subtree length) and ways of systematically studying them. Develop simulation studies, pull together phylogenies, apply algorithms of phylogenetic measures of biodiversity to both simulated and real trees.

This session should also focus our attention on some specific questions. In discussions and correspondence with others, the following seem to be priorities for many of us:

(1) Spurred by the Nee & May (1997) paper, how is extinction phylogenetically distributed? Discuss possible ways to analytically evaluate problem.

(2) What models and simulation work have been developed to assess extinction rates across taxa? Are species invasions related to phylogenetic history?

(3) Crozier (1997) has developed a "genetic diversity" measure that uses branch lengths to estimate phylogenetic patterns of diversity. This could be assessed analytically via simulations. Other measures of phylogenetic diversity (Faith 1994) should also be assessed for relationships with other measures of character diversity, biodiversity and "hotspots".

(4) How do measures of taxonomic diversity (e.g., Warwick and Clarke 1998) compare with phylogenetic diversity? This may be an important "synthetic" question because it highlights differences between approaches developed by ecologists relative to those of systematists.

(5) What real data sets are useful for testing questions posed above and how should we link into web sources such as TreeBase, WorldMap and GIS?

(6) How can the results of our group, particularly as related to practical issues of classifying species and preserving vulnerable taxa, be effectively communicated to conservation institutions?

Tuesday, 17 August

Morning

Develop subgroups. Examples include one for carrying out simulation studies. Also, for those considering various measures of quantifying biodiversity (genetic; phenotypic; fossil).

Wednesday, 18 August

Morning

All of us meet together. Each subgroup discusses its progress and plans.

Afternoon

Break up into subgroups.

Thursday, 19 August

Begin discussion of specific details of website: each subgroup should have its

own link and possible data set. Designate people to maintain each link and

site. Discuss design of website.

Friday, 20 August

Discuss possible publications: journal articles and edited book. Also, other people to invite to future meetings.

Saturday, 21 August

Open