PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Rikki Gumbs
AU  - Claudia L. Gray
AU  - Monika Böhm
AU  - Michael Hoffmann
AU  - Richard Grenyer
AU  - Walter Jetz
AU  - Shai Meiri
AU  - Uri Roll
AU  - Nisha R. Owen
AU  - James Rosindell
TI  - Global priorities for conservation of reptilian phylogenetic diversity in the face of human impacts
AID  - 10.1101/723742
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 723742
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/02/723742.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/02/723742.full
AB  - Phylogenetic Diversity (PD) is increasingly recognised as an important measure that can provide information on evolutionary and functional aspects of biodiversity for conservation planning that are not readily captured by species diversity. Here we develop and analyse two new metrics that combine the effects of PD and human encroachment on species range size — one metric valuing regions and another enabling species prioritisation. We evaluate these metrics for reptiles, which have been largely neglected in previous studies, and contrast these results with equivalent calculations for all terrestrial vertebrate groups. We find that high human impacted areas unfortunately coincide with the most valuable areas of reptilian diversity, more than expected by chance. We also find that, under our species-level metric, the highest priority reptile species score far above the top mammal and bird species, and they include a disproportionate number of species with insufficient information on potential threats. Such Data Deficient species are, in terms of our metric, comparable to Critically Endangered species and may require urgent conservation attention.