Abstract

Weighted trees can be viewed as depictions of informational redundancy among tips. There is a rich literature in conservation biology on how this view can be used to maximize this information in triage situations or predict the future loss of such evolutionary information. Early views that redundancy is expected to be high is supported neither by theory on tree shapes nor by surveys of phylogenies. This means that work on maximization is relevant and timely. However, much triage is done within, rather than between, independent lineages; more theoretical work is needed to translate relevant metrics to, e.g., haplotype networks on landscapes.