Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, Regent's Park, London NW1 4RY, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2011 Sep 27;366(1578):2611-22. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0109.
Under the impact of human activity, global extinction rates have risen a thousand times higher than shown in the fossil record. The resources available for conservation are insufficient to prevent the loss of much of the world's threatened biodiversity during this crisis. Conservation planners have been forced to prioritize their protective activities, in the context of great uncertainty. This has become known as 'the agony of choice'. A range of methods have been proposed for prioritizing species for conservation attention; one of the most strongly supported is prioritizing those species that maximize phylogenetic distinctiveness (PD). We evaluate how a composite measure of extinction risk and phylogenetic isolation (EDGE) has been used to prioritize species according to their degree of unique evolutionary history (evolutionary distinctiveness, ED) weighted by conservation urgency (global endangerment, GE). We review PD-based approaches and provide an updated list of EDGE mammals using the 2010 IUCN Red List. We evaluate how robust this method is to changes in phylogenetic uncertainty, knowledge of taxonomy and extinction risk, and examine how mammalian species that rank highly in EDGE score are representative of the collective from which they are drawn.
在人类活动的影响下，全球灭绝速度比化石记录显示的要高出千倍。可用的保护资源不足以防止在这场危机中丧失世界上大部分受到威胁的生物多样性。在极大的不确定性背景下，保护规划者被迫优先考虑他们的保护活动。这已被称为“选择的痛苦”。已经提出了一系列用于优先考虑保护注意物种的方法；其中最受支持的是优先考虑那些最大限度地提高系统发育独特性（PD）的物种。我们评估了根据其独特进化历史程度（进化独特性，ED）加权的保守紧迫性（全球濒危，GE）来根据物种的灭绝风险和系统发育隔离（EDGE）综合衡量对物种进行优先排序的方法。我们审查了基于 PD 的方法，并使用 2010 年 IUCN 红色名录提供了 EDGE 哺乳动物的更新列表。我们评估了这种方法对系统发育不确定性、分类学知识和灭绝风险变化的稳健性，并检查了在 EDGE 得分中排名较高的哺乳动物物种在多大程度上代表了它们所属的整体。
