Hedging Our Bets: The Expected Contribution of Species to Future Phylogenetic Diversity

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 measured by its expected contribution to phylogenetic diversity. Our approach considers all possible scenarios for the set of species that will be extant at some future time, and weights them according to their likelihood under an independent (but not identical) distribution on species extinctions. Although the number of extinction scenarios can typically be very large, we show that there is a simple algorithm that will quickly compute this index. The method is implemented and applied to the prosimian primates as a test case, and the associated species ranking is compared to a related measure (the ‘Shapley index’). We describe indices for rooted and unrooted trees, and a modification that also includes the focal taxon’s probability of extinction and which links two complementary approaches to conserving phylogenetic diversity.