Related papers: Hedging our bets: the expected contribution of spe…
Phylogenetic diversity is a measure for describing how much of an evolutionary tree is spanned by a subset of species. If one applies this to the (unknown) subset of current species that will still be present at some future time, then this…
The loss of biodiversity due to the likely widespread extinction of species in the near future is a focus of current concern in conservation biology. One approach to measure the impact of this extinction is based on the predicted loss of…
Planning for the protection of species often involves difficult choices about which species to prioritize, given constrained resources. One way of prioritizing species is to consider their "evolutionary distinctiveness", i.e. their relative…
Difficulties identifying appropriate biodiversity impact metrics remain a major barrier to inclusion of biodiversity considerations in environmentally responsible investment. We propose and analyse a simple science-based local metric: the…
For many taxa, the current high rates of extinction are likely to result in a significant loss of biodiversity. The evolutionary heritage of biodiversity is frequently quantified by a measure called phylogenetic diversity (PD). We predict…
Understanding the coexistence of diverse species in a changing environment is an important problem in community ecology. Bet-hedging is a strategy that helps species survive in such changing environments. However, studies of bet-hedging…
The Shapley Value and the Fair Proportion Index of phylogenetic trees have been frequently discussed as prioritization tools in conservation biology. Both indices rank species according to their contribution to total phylogenetic diversity,…
Phylogenies are commonly used to represent the evolutionary relationships between species, and often these phylogenies are equipped with edge lengths that indicate degrees of evolutionary difference. Given such a phylogeny, a popular…
Bet-hedging is a phenotype diversification strategy that combines a fast-growing vulnerable phenotype with a slow-growing resistant phenotype. In environments switching between favorable and unfavorable conditions, bet-hedging optimizes…
The constant rate birth--death process is a popular null model for speciation and extinction. If one removes extinct and non-sampled lineages, this process induces `reconstructed trees' which describe the relationship between extant…
In biodiversity conservation it is often necessary to prioritize the species to conserve. Existing approaches to prioritization, e.g. the Fair Proportion Index and the Shapley Value, are based on phylogenetic trees and rank species…
In a complex community, species continuously adapt to each other. On rare occasions, the adaptation of a species can lead to the extinction of others, and even its own. "Adaptive dynamics" is the standard mathematical framework to describe…
We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of…
In conservation biology, phylogenetic diversity (PD) provides a way to quantify the impact of the current rapid extinction of species on the evolutionary `Tree of Life'. This approach recognises that extinction not only removes species but…
We use a classical combinatorial inequality to establish a Markov inequality for multivariate binary Markov processes on trees. We then apply this result, alongside with the FKG inequality, to compare the expected loss of biodiversity under…
The fitness of a biological strategy is typically measured by its expected reproductive rate, the first moment of its offspring distribution. However, strategies with high expected rates can also have high probabilities of extinction. A…
In this study we are concerned with the general problem of choosing from a set of endangered species T a subset S of k species to protect as a priority. Here, the interest to protect the species of S is assessed by the resulting expected…
A wide variety of stochastic models of cladogenesis (based on speciation and extinction) lead to an identical distribution on phylogenetic tree shapes once the edge lengths are ignored. By contrast, the distribution of the tree's edge…
We describe a simple model of evolution which incorporates the branching and extinction of species lines, and also includes abiotic influences. A first principles approach is taken in which the probability for speciation and extinction are…
Recent methodological advances are enabling better examination of speciation and extinction processes and patterns. A major open question is the origin of large discrepancies in species number between groups of the same age. Existing…