Biodiversity assessment among two Nebraska prairies: a comparison between traditional and phylogenetic diversity indices

Background: Conservation of the evolutionary diversity among organisms should be included in the selection of priority regions for preservation of Earth’s biodiversity. Traditionally, biodiversity has been determined from an assessment of species richness (S), abundance, evenness, rarity, etc. of organisms but not from variation in species’ evolutionary histories. Phylogenetic diversity (PD) measures evolutionary differences between taxa in a community and is gaining acceptance as a biodiversity assessment tool. However, with the increase in the number of ways to calculate PD, end-users and decision-makers are left wondering how metrics compare and what data are needed to calculate various metrics. New information: In this study, we used massively parallel sequencing to generate over 65,000 DNA characters from three cellular compartments for over 60 species in the asterid clade of flowering plants. We estimated asterid phylogenies from character datasets of varying nucleotide quantities...

背景：生物进化多样性的保护应纳入地球生物多样性优先保护区域的选择框架。传统上，生物多样性评估依赖物种丰富度（S）、丰度、均匀度、稀有度等指标，却未考量物种进化历史的差异。系统发育多样性（PD）可衡量群落内类群间的进化差异，正逐渐成为广受认可的生物多样性评估工具。然而，随着PD计算方法的增多，终端用户与决策者对各指标的可比性及计算所需数据类型产生了困惑。

新信息：本研究采用大规模平行测序技术，对被子植物菊类分支（asterid clade）中60余个物种的三个细胞区室进行测序，生成了超过65000个DNA特征。我们基于不同核苷酸数量的特征数据集，对菊类分支的系统发育关系展开了估计……