English to Portuguese Science Environment & Ecology Biogeografia e conservaç

Phylogenetic diversity (PD) can be defined as a biodiversity index that measures the length of evolutionary pathways that connect a given set of taxa, and it is regarded as a surrogate for the ‘feature diversity’ that arises along the branches of the evolutionary tree (Faith, 2006; Forest et al., 2007). Quantifying the diversity of such ‘features’ is important because it is difficult to know which features of an organism will be advantageous as the environment changes. Thus, maximizing PD may be the best bet-hedging strategy to ensure that evolution has the necessary raw materials on which to work in a rapidly changing world.