Phylogenetic patterns of extinction risk: the need for critical application of appropriate datasets

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1 Africa and Madagascar Department, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO, U.S.A.
2 Zoology Department, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
3 Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
4 Department of Geography, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, U.S.A.
5 Department of Plant Systematics, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany
6 Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK
7 Tanzania Country Office, WWF, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
8 Environment Department, University of York, York, UK
9 Monographic Studies Department, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO, U.S.A.
10 Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.55v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Biodiversity, Biogeography, Conservation Biology, Plant Science
Keywords
conservation, extinction, datasets, ecosystems, phylogeny, risk assessment, Eastern Arc Mountains, Kenya, Tanzania, bias
Copyright
© 2013 Gereau et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Cite this article
Gereau RE, Burgess ND, Fjeldså J, Hall J, Hemp A, Jump AS, Kajuni AR, Marchant RA, Marshall AR, Platts PJ, Taylor CM, Tibazarwa FI. 2013. Phylogenetic patterns of extinction risk: the need for critical application of appropriate datasets. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e55v1

Abstract

In order to conduct a replicable analysis of the possible phylogenetic patterns of extinction risk, one must first formulate a clear set of definitions of ecosystem boundaries and risk categories. Subsequently, a robust and internally consistent dataset that includes all the available information on species distributions and risk assessments must be assembled. Here, we review the dataset and methodology of a recent paper focused on phylogenetic patterns of plant extinction risk in the Eastern Arc Mountains of Kenya and Tanzania and point out some of the limitations of inferring such patterns from inadequate and biased data. We show that bias in the dataset is probably responsible for the conclusion that Vulnerable species are more closely related than expected by chance, and provide guidelines for the construction of an appropriate dataset for such an analysis.