What is it about?
Phylodiversity is a metric of biodiversity taking into account the phylogeny of species (or other categories of individuals). It can be expressed as a number of effective species, i.e. the number of equifrequent species with a unique, common ancestor, that would yield the observed diversity. It can be consistently partitioned between alpha (the average local diversity of communities), beta (the level of distinction between them) and gamma diversity (the diversity of their assemblage); Appropriate estimators are available for hyperdiverse systems such as tropical forests.
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Why is it important?
Measuring biodiversity is essential for conservation and to understand the functioning of ecosystems. Rigorous measures based on a solid theory are desirable. To be useful, they must allow robust estimation from real data. Phylodiversity is such a measure.
Perspectives
A similar measure applicable to functional diversity, i.e. to species whose mutual distances are not in a dendrogram but in a more general distance matrix is the next step.
Eric Marcon
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This page is a summary of: Decomposing phylodiversity, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, December 2014, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/2041-210x.12323.
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