Climate change will shrink phylogenetic endemism of neotropical frogs

Climate change is widely recognized as one of the main current threats to biodiversity 1 and predicting its consequences is critical to conservation efforts. A wide range of studies have evaluated the effects of future climate using taxon-based metrics 2, but few studies to date have applied a phylogenetic approach to forecast these impacts. Here, we show that future climate change will significantly modify not only species richness, (SR) but also phylogenetic diversity (PD) and phylogenetic endemism (PE) of Neotropical frogs. Our results show that 29% (n = 92) of species will shrink their potential distributions and 2.08% (n = 8) will disappear by 2050. Furthermore, we find that current areas of high SR and PD are not congruent with some areas of high PE in the future. Our study highlights the impacts of climate change on Neotropical frog diversity and identifies target areas for conservation efforts that consider not just species numbers, but also their distinct evolutionary histories.