Conserving avian evolutionary history can effectively safeguard future benefits for people

Plant evolutionary history is largely underrepresented in European seed banks

Considering the alarming prospect of at least two in five plant species facing extinction, it is urgent to identify unsecured phylogenetic branches within the plant Tree of Life and adopt appropriate conservation strategies. While conventional seed banking has the potential to safeguard a large part of world's flora, the scarcity of phylogenetically informed ex situ conservation programmes poses a challenge to effective plant conservation. Leveraging an extensive dataset of seed collections across 109 European seed banks, our study reveals that current collections capture a phylogenetically diverse subset of the European flora. However, they safeguard between 43.29% and 66.40% of the maximum possible phylogenetic diversity, suggesting that specific major branches of the plant phylogeny in Europe remain unprotected. To address this gap, we introduce a novel quasi-deterministic method to generate a list of unbanked species, prioritized by evolutionary significance. Although this approach can enhance the evolutionary quality of seed bank collections, biological, technical and practical constraints may limit conventional seed banking for some of these priority species. We advocate for an enhanced coordination among conservation facilities and the integration of phylogenetic perspectives with advancements in ex situ conservation techniques beyond conventional seed banking, to effectively conserve plant evolutionary heritage.

Global conservation status of the jawed vertebrate Tree of Life

Human-driven extinction threatens entire lineages across the Tree of Life. Here we assess the conservation status of jawed vertebrate evolutionary history, using three policy-relevant approaches. First, we calculate an index of threat to overall evolutionary history, showing that we expect to lose 86-150 billion years (11-19%) of jawed vertebrate evolutionary history over the next 50-500 years. Second, we rank jawed vertebrate species by their EDGE scores to identify the highest priorities for species-focused conservation of evolutionary history, finding that chondrichthyans, ray-finned fish and testudines rank highest of all jawed vertebrates. Third, we assess the conservation status of jawed vertebrate families. We found that species within monotypic families are more likely to be threatened and more likely to be in decline than other species. We provide a baseline for the status of families at risk of extinction to catalyse conservation action. This work continues a trend of highlighting neglected groups-such as testudines, crocodylians, amphibians and chondrichthyans-as conservation priorities from a phylogenetic perspective.

Dense city centers support less evolutionary unique bird communities than sparser urban areas

Urbanization alters avian communities, generally lowering the number of species and contemporaneously increasing their functional relatedness, leading to biotic homogenization. Urbanization can also negatively affect the phylogenetic diversity of species assemblages, potentially decreasing their evolutionary distinctiveness. We compare species assemblages in a gradient of building density in seventeen European cities to test whether the evolutionary distinctiveness of communities is shaped by the degree of urbanization. We found a significant decline in the evolutionary uniqueness of avian communities in highly dense urban areas, compared to low and medium-dense areas. Overall, communities from dense city centers supported one million years of evolutionary history less than communities from low-dense urban areas. Such evolutionary homogenization was due to a filtering process of the most evolutionarily unique birds. Metrics related to evolutionary uniqueness have to play a role when assessing the effects of urbanization and can be used to identify local conservation priorities.