Distribution of phylogenetic diversity under random extinction

Details Distribution of phylogenetic diversity under random extinction Distribution of phylogenetic diversity under random extinction

2007-08-02

arxiv.org/abs/0708.0425v1

Biology

Quantitative Biology

Subcellular Processes

20 pages, 4 figures

Scientific paper

Phylogenetic diversity is a measure for describing how much of an evolutionary tree is spanned by a subset of species. If one applies this to the (unknown) subset of current species that will still be present at some future time, then this `future phylogenetic diversity' provides a measure of the impact of various extinction scenarios in biodiversity conservation. In this paper we study the distribution of future phylogenetic diversity under a simple model of extinction (a generalized `field of bullets' model). We show that the distribution of future phylogenetic diversity converges to a normal distribution as the number of species grows (under mild conditions, which are necessary). We also describe an algorithm to compute the distribution efficiently, provided the edge lengths are integral, and briefly outline the significance of our findings for biodiversity conservation.

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