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.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- 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. · URL
- 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
Curated claims
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Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.