Process / pipelinePhylogenetics
Faith's Phylogenetic Diversity
Faith's Phylogenetic Diversity (PD), introduced by David Faith (1992), measures the evolutionary diversity within a community by summing the branch lengths of a phylogenetic tree connecting all species. Unlike species richness, which counts species equally regardless of evolutionary relationships, PD weights species by their evolutionary distinctiveness: a community with evolutionarily distant species has higher PD than one dominated by recently diverged species. PD is widely used in conservation to prioritize protection of species and habitats that preserve evolutionary history.
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Sources
- Faith, D. P. (1992). Conservation evaluation and phylogenetic diversity. Biological Conservation, 61(1), 1-10. DOI: 10.1016/0006-3207(92)91201-3 ↗
- Steel, M., & Mooers, A. O. (2010). The expected value of shed phylogenetic diversity. PLoS Biology, 8(9), e1000475. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000475 ↗
- Redding, D. W., & Mooers, A. O. (2006). Incorporating evolutionary measures into conservation prioritization. Conservation Biology, 20(6), 1670-1678. DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2006.00555.x ↗