Imperial College London
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ProfessorJamesRosindell

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park)

Professor of Biodiversity Theory
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 2242j.rosindell

 
 
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Location

 

W1.5KennedySilwood Park

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Rosindell:2022:10.1101/2022.07.16.499419,
author = {Rosindell, J and Manson, K and Gumbs, R and Pearse, WD and Steel, M},
doi = {10.1101/2022.07.16.499419},
title = {Phylogenetic Biodiversity Metrics Should Account for Both Accumulation and Attrition of Evolutionary Heritage},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.16.499419},
year = {2022}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - <jats:title>A<jats:sc>bstract</jats:sc></jats:title><jats:p>Phylogenetic metrics are essential tools used in the study of ecology, evolution and conservation. Phylogenetic diversity (PD) in particular is one of the most prominent measures of biodiversity, and is based on the idea that biological features accumulate along the edges of phylogenetic trees that are summed. We argue that PD and many other phylogenetic biodiversity metrics fail to capture an essential process that we term attrition. Attrition is the gradual loss of features through causes other than extinction. Here we introduce ‘EvoHeritage’, a generalisation of PD that is founded on the joint processes of accumulation and attrition of features. We argue that whilst PD measures evolutionary history, EvoHeritage is required to capture a more pertinent subset of evolutionary history including only components that have survived attrition. We show that EvoHeritage is not the same as PD on a tree with scaled edges; instead, accumulation and attrition interact in a more complex non-monophyletic way that cannot be captured by edge lengths alone. This leads us to speculate that the one dimensional edge lengths of classic trees may be insufficiently flexible to capture the nuances of evolutionary processes. We derive a measure of EvoHeritage and show that it elegantly reproduces species richness and PD at opposite ends of a continuum based on the intensity of attrition. We demonstrate the utility of EvoHeritage in ecology as a predictor of community productivity compared with species richness and PD. We also show how EvoHeritage can quantify living fossils and resolve their associated controversy. We suggest how the existing calculus of PD-based metrics and other phylogenetic biodiversity metrics can and should be recast in terms of EvoHeritage accumulation and attrition.</jats:p><jats:sec><jats:title>Candidate cover image</jats:title><jats:fig
AU  - Rosindell,J
AU  - Manson,K
AU  - Gumbs,R
AU  - Pearse,WD
AU  - Steel,M
DO  - 10.1101/2022.07.16.499419
PY  - 2022///
TI  - Phylogenetic Biodiversity Metrics Should Account for Both Accumulation and Attrition of Evolutionary Heritage
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.16.499419
ER  -
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