IRMACS: The Interdisciplinary Colloquium: "Phylogenetics and Conservation Management"

Abstract

Conservation organizations are faced with the difficult problem of allocating their limited resources to many needy species. In this situation they often aim to conserve as many species as possible or are driven by factors such as the charismatic or economic value of a species. Under most motivations for conservation, the aim should be to ensure that the species that survive into the future have maximal biodiversity -- to achieve this it is necessary to have a formal measure of biodiversity. In this talk I will consider biodiversity measures that utilise a rooted phylogenetic tree -- a graph that depicts the evolutionary relationships between the species of interest. The Noah's Ark Problem (NAP) is a conservation management framework that combines species survival probabilities, conservation costs and a phylogenetic measure of biodiversity. The NAP has seen much theoretical attention as it presents a complex computational problem. In this talk I will consider some algorithms for solving the NAP and some sensitivity analysis results. Due to lack of data the location of many species in the tree may only be known approximately. This may introduce biases for conservation methods such as the NAP. I will discuss possible biases and present methods for correcting these biases using evolutionary null models.