EGS Seminar Tuesday 09th November 2010

Tuesday 09^th November, E0.05 from 1.00-2.00 pm.  

Lunch, and an opportunity to chat with the speaker, will be in room E402 from 12:30. All are invited!

Dr David Redding, MMU

‘Big Bird Trees, Bar Codes and Conserving the Tree-of-life’

There are limited funds available for an increasingly large number of threatened species. ‘Conservation triage’ is the young science of deciding which threatened species we cannot afford to let go, rather than simply attending to species in order of their threat of extinction. To achieve triage, however, we have to decide on other ways to value species relative to one another.

Raw genetic code is one possible unit of biodiversity, indeed one that is not biased by historical taxonomic decisions. If we accept this as our unit, it is logical to aim to preserve the greatest possible amount of genetic information with the fewest species, given our remit to conserve biodiversity with limited funds.

Each species contribution to conserving genetic information is not equal, with some species having, for instance, a much greater amount of unique evolutionary history than others. Consider the ostrich and the common crow: the crow has several hundred species that it could consider close or medium-close relatives, while the ostrich has none and, moreover, it split off from the evolutionary tree of birds roughly 40 million years ago (compared to the crow's 1-2 MY). In the last 40 million years, the ostrich is likely to have accrued many genetic changes that are found nowhere else in the evolutionary tree of birds.

In this talk, I demonstrate two novel ways to measure how many close relatives a species has, thus quantifying a species’ possible contribution to conserving genetic information. I also show how we can include a measure of this evolutionary isolation into current conservation policy, as recently demonstrated by the EDGE project (www.edgeofexistence.org). As part of the next phase of the EDGE project, I will discuss how we will use a newly-developed phylogeny of the world’s birds to establish the EDGE birds list. Finally, to extend this conservation approach into less well-known taxonomic groups, I show that we may be able to use the increasingly large amount of genetic barcode data becoming available to isolate those invertebrate species that may be important contributors to conserving the tree of life.