Related papers: Properties of biodiversity indices that model futu…
If predictions for species extinctions hold, then the `tree of life' today may be quite different to that in (say) 100 years. We describe a technique to quantify how much each species is likely to contribute to future biodiversity, as…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Phylogenetic diversity is a popular measure for quantifying the biodiversity of a collection $Y$ of species, while phylogenetic diversity indices provide a way to apportion phylogenetic diversity to individual species. Typically, for some…
Ecosystems face intensifying threats from climate change, overexploitation, and other human pressures, emphasizing the urgent need to identify keystone species and vulnerable ones. While established network-based measures often rely on a…
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…
Phylogenetic Diversity (PD) is a prominent quantitative measure of the biodiversity of a collection of present-day species (taxa). This measure is based on the evolutionary distance among the species in the collection. Loosely speaking, if…
Diversity indices are useful single-number metrics for characterizing a complex distribution of a set of attributes across a population of interest. The utility of these different metrics or sets of metrics depend on the context and…
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…
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…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
Entropy measures of probability distributions are widely used measures in ecology, biology, genetics, and in other fields, to quantify species diversity of a community. Unfortunately, entropy-based diversity indices, or diversity indices…
Phylogenetic diversity indices are commonly used to rank the elements in a collection of species or populations for conservation purposes. The derivation of these indices is typically based on some quantitative description of the…
Diversity indices have been traditionally used to capture the biodiversity of ecosystems by measuring the effective number of species or groups of species. In contrast to abundance, which is correlated with the amount of data available,…
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,…