Forest Félix, Crandall Keith A, Chase Mark W, Faith Daniel P
Jodrell Laboratory, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond TW9 3DS, UK
Computational Biology Institute, George Washington University, Ashburn, VA 20147, USA Department of Invertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20013, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2015 Feb 19;370(1662):20140002. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0002.
Evolutionary studies have played a fundamental role in our understanding of life, but until recently, they had only a relatively modest involvement in addressing conservation issues. The main goal of the present discussion meeting issue is to offer a platform to present the available methods allowing the integration of phylogenetic and extinction risk data in conservation planning. Here, we identify the main knowledge gaps in biodiversity science, which include incomplete sampling, reconstruction biases in phylogenetic analyses, partly known species distribution ranges, and the difficulty in producing conservation assessments for all known species, not to mention that much of the effective biological diversity remains to be discovered. Given the impact that human activities have on biodiversity and the urgency with which we need to address these issues, imperfect assumptions need to be sanctioned and surrogates used in the race to salvage as much as possible of our natural and evolutionary heritage. We discuss some aspects of the uncertainties found in biodiversity science, such as the ideal surrogates for biodiversity, the gaps in our knowledge and the numerous available phylogenetic diversity-based methods. We also introduce a series of cases studies that demonstrate how evolutionary biology can effectively contribute to biodiversity conservation science.
进化研究在我们对生命的理解中发挥了基础性作用，但直到最近，它们在解决保护问题方面的参与程度还相对有限。本次研讨会特刊的主要目标是提供一个平台，展示在保护规划中整合系统发育和灭绝风险数据的现有方法。在此，我们确定了生物多样性科学中的主要知识空白，包括采样不完整、系统发育分析中的重建偏差、部分已知物种的分布范围，以及为所有已知物种进行保护评估的困难，更不用说还有许多有效的生物多样性仍有待发现。鉴于人类活动对生物多样性的影响以及我们解决这些问题的紧迫性，在这场尽可能挽救我们自然和进化遗产的竞赛中，不完美的假设需要得到认可，并且要使用替代物。我们讨论了生物多样性科学中发现的一些不确定性方面，例如生物多样性的理想替代物、我们知识中的空白以及众多基于系统发育多样性的可用方法。我们还介绍了一系列案例研究，展示了进化生物学如何能有效地为生物多样性保护科学做出贡献。
