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feasible, also including evolutionary history in the analyses, because evolutionary
history is not always well represented by targeting species for conservation.
Keywords Phylogeneticdiversity•Quadraticentropy•Spatialprioritization•
Zonation
Introduction
Systematic Conservation Planning Protected areas around the world have typi-
cally been established in areas of low competing interests, which is not ideal from
the perspective of biodiversity conservation (Pressey et al. 1993 ). Such biased allo-
cation may even lead to existing protected areas performing worse than randomly
chosen areas in representing diversity (Ferrier 2002 ). The realization that conserva-
tion would benefit from cost-effective practices led to the development of the field
of Systematic conservation planning (Box 1 , Margules and Pressey 2000 ; Margules
and Sarkar 2007 ). More than 20 years of development have led to the integration of
numerous aspects to the approach adding to its realism. In particular, the spatial
prioritization for assessing the existing conservation areas and selecting new ones
have become comprehensive and efficient, and nowadays they also provide more
user-friendly graphical user interfaces, which has facilitated their broad use for
practical conservation planning purposes (Ball et al. 2009 ; Moilanen et al. 2009 ).
Evolutionary History in Conservation Phylogenetic diversity or species origi-
nality are often mentioned as important for conservation (Rosauer and Mooers
2013 ; Winter et al. 2013 ), and the history of such discussion goes back already a few
decades (Vane-Wright et al. 1991 ; Faith 1992 ). Evolutionary history is often quanti-
fied in community ecology for the purpose of understanding the diversity of current
species distributions (Davies and Buckley 2011 ; Fritz and Rahbek 2012 ) or the
potential functioning of ecosystems (Cadotte et al. 2012 ), whereas applications to
conservation have remained limited.
Box 1
The process of systematic conservation planning as described by Margules
and Pressey ( 2000 ).- Compile data on the biodiversity of the planning region
- Identify conservation goals for the planning region
- Review existing conservation areas
- Select additional conservation areas
- Implement conservation actions
- Maintain the required values of conservation areas
A. Arponen and L. Zupan