“Conserving phylogenetic diversity - what does it mean, how well does it work, and who cares?”

It has been very nearly 30 years since the first call to incorporate evolutionary diversity into conservation planning was published. Since Robert May published “Taxonomy as destiny” in 1990, the idea of evolutionarily-aware — and specifically phylogenetically-aware — conservation planning has become part of the academic conservation mainstream. To date, though, it has only been operationalised in one major conservation scheme: the EDGE program run out of the Institute of Zoology. In this talk, I will present several pieces of recent and unpublished work by myself and colleagues which seek to pick apart what phylogenetic diversity is and is not, what it may be capable of, and whether it can provide an answer to the other key question posed in May’s paper: could the WWF replace its panda logo with one (or presumably some set of) of the world’s ~2000 rodents?