Biodiversity Conservation and Phylogenetic Systematics

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Future Directions

As demonstrated here, rarefaction of PD has a straightforward application in stan-
dardising PD across samples so that they can be compared directly. Further, depend-
ing on the accumulation unit, the rarefaction formula can be extended to the
calculation of metrics of phylogenetic evenness, phylogenetic beta-diversity and
phylogenetic dispersion. However, the application of the PD rarefaction formula

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500

1000

1500

2000

2500

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No. of species

Phylogenetic Diversity (Ma)

New Caledonia dry forests

Mount Lofty woodlands

Central Range montane rainforests

Fig. 6 Species-based rarefaction curves for mammal assemblages of terrestrial ecoregions of the
Australasian biogeographic realm Ecoregions are as defined by Olson et al. ( 2001 ). Data are
sourced from the wildfinder database (http://worldwildlife.org/pages/wildfinder). Three ecore-
gionsarehighlighted,ashavingminimum(NewCaledoniadryforests),maximum(MountLofty
woodlands) or median (Central Range montane rainforests) values of phylogenetic dispersion
(∆PD)

Table 4 Comparison of diversity measures for mammal assemblages of selected ecoregions of the
Australasian biogeographic realm

Ecoregion

Species

richness

Phylogenetic

diversity(Ma)

Phylogenetic

dispersion (∆PD)

New Caledonia dry forests 7 347 51.3

Central range montane rainforests 109 2768 103.6

MountLoftywoodlands 34 1504 110.7

D.A. Nipperess