conservation shortened

Functional diversity (FD)

Range and distribution of functional traits across a community — how species interact with their environment and affect ecosystem processes (Petchey & Gaston 2002).

Functional richness

Volume of trait space occupied — how much niche space is filled.

Functional evenness

How evenly abundance is distributed across occupied trait space — high = efficient resource use.

Functional divergence

Whether the most abundant species sit at the extremes of trait space, maximising niche differentiation (Mason et al. 2005).

Why SR alone fails

Treats all species as equivalent — cannot distinguish redundant from functionally diverse communities. Poor surrogate for rare/threatened species (Grenyer et al. 2006).

Phylogenetic diversity (PD)

Sum of branch lengths on a phylogenetic tree — more branch length = more evolutionary history and future adaptive potential retained (Faith 1992).

Option value

We cannot predict which traits will be useful — conserving deep branches hedges against this uncertainty (Tucker et al. 2019).

Evolutionary distinctiveness (ED)

How much unique branch length a species represents — how isolated it is from living relatives. Tuatara = classic high-ED example.

EDGE metric

Evolutionary Distinctiveness + Global Endangerment (Isaac et al. 2007) — prioritises species that are both irreplaceable and threatened.

Mazel et al. (2018)

Prioritising PD does NOT reliably capture FD — the two facets are weakly correlated and cannot substitute for each other.

Systematic Conservation Planning (SCP)

Structured, iterative, quantitative approach to designing PA networks to meet explicit biodiversity targets — replacing ad hoc, politically convenient reserve placement (Margules & Pressey 2000).

Two objectives of SCP

Representativeness (reserves sample full biodiversity variety) and persistence (reserves maintain viable populations long-term) — Margules & Sarkar 2007.

Complementarity

Two areas have high complementarity if they share few species — selecting complementary areas gives better representation per site than selecting richest areas.

Irreplaceability

How essential an area is to meeting a conservation target — 100% means the target cannot be met without it. Dynamic: recalculated as areas are reserved or lost.

SSCP

Species Set Covering Problem — find the smallest number of sites sampling every species' range at least once. NP-hard.

MSCP

Maximal Species Covering Problem — given a fixed budget, maximise species represented.

Three SCP data sensitivities

(1) Granularity — results change with spatial resolution. (2) Thresholds — how much of a range must fall in a reserve to count? (3) Surrogacy — one taxon cannot reliably represent others, especially for threatened species.

Grenyer et al. (2006)

Surrogacy between taxa decreases at finer scales and is lowest for rare/threatened species — random selection sometimes outperforms existing global conservation schemes.

Linnean shortfall

Undescribed species — we don't know what we don't know.

Wallacean shortfall

Species described but ranges poorly mapped.

Prestonian shortfall

Species and ranges known but abundance unknown — distinct from Linnean and Wallacean (Grenyer L3).

CI biodiversity hotspot criteria

1500+ endemic vascular plant species AND 70%+ of original habitat lost.

Synergistic extinction drivers

Habitat loss; overexploitation; invasive species; pollution; disease; climate change — interact synergistically so total threat cannot be reliably predicted from individual drivers alone.

Extinction debt

Extinctions already guaranteed by past habitat loss but not yet occurred — species persist temporarily before delayed extinction plays out.

Defaunation

Depletion of animal life even from non-extinct but severely reduced populations — captures functional loss that extinction statistics miss (Dirzo et al. 2014).

Shifting baseline

Each generation takes the biodiversity of their own experience as normal — systematically underestimates cumulative historical loss.

Land-sparing

High-yield farming on one area frees separate land entirely for nature.

Land-sharing

Low-intensity wildlife-friendly farming integrates biodiversity and food production on the same land.

Anti-politics — Grenyer

Using crisis framing to bypass political debate about conservation values. Undermines long-term robustness — resilience requires political acceptance; which requires discourse.

Implementation gap

SCP produces optimal plans but political constraints frequently prevent implementation — the technology works; the politics often don't.