[Bil18a] Phylogenetic conservation prioritization with uncertainty
Revue Internationale avec comité de lecture :
Journal Biodiversity and conservation,
vol. 27(12),
pp. 3137-3153,
2018, (
doi:
10.1007/s10531-018-1593-z)
Mots clés: Biodiversity conservation · Phylogenetic diversity · Uncertainty · Protected
species · Optimization
Résumé:
We consider a set of species S and are interested in the assessment of the subsets of S from
a phylogenetic diversity viewpoint. Several measures can be used for this assessment. Here
we have retained phylogenetic diversity (PD) in the sense of Faith, a measure widely used
to reflect the evolutionary history accumulated by a group of species. The PD of a group of
species X included in S is easy to calculate when the phylogenetic tree associated with S is
perfectly known but this situation is rarely verified. We are interested here in cases where
uncertainty regarding the length of branches and the topology of the tree is reflected in the
fact that several phylogenetic trees are considered to be plausible for the set S. We propose
several measures of the phylogenetic diversity to take account of the uncertainty arising
from this situation. A natural problem in the field of biological conservation is to select
the best subset of species to protect from a group of threatened species. Here, the best subset
is the one that optimizes the proposed measures. We show how to solve these optimal
selection problems by integer linear programming. The approach is illustrated by several
examples.