Prioritizing conservation decisions is a challenge exacerbated by limited budgets and missing species data. The primary goal of the USDA Forest Service’s PACFISH/INFISH Biological Opinion Effectiveness Monitoring program (PIBO) is to determine the integrity of riparian and in-stream habitat quality of sites, which are managed for multiple uses, throughout the Interior Columbia and Upper Missouri river basins. The program’s effectiveness to achieve this task has been hampered by a lack of reliable metrics of ecosystem health and integrity that generalize across taxonomic groups. Phylogeny, the evolutionary history of species, has the power to transform conservation decision-making, highlighting species whose loss or gain might have an oversized impact on community structure and ecosystem function. Despite its widespread use in academic biology, phylogenetic diversity is rarely used in management. Here we examine and test its utility as an actionable measure of ecosystem health and management effectiveness.
Results/Conclusions
PIBO data were downloaded for 1667 sites across 16 years, and a phylogeny generated for species from these data. Phylogenetic diversity was strongly predicted by site disturbance, road density, and broader environmental drivers such as mean annual temperature. Sites managed for multiple uses and those designated as ‘reference’ sites did not show consistent phylogenetic diversity patterns, likely because of the strong signals of other, quantitative, abiotic measures of the degree of impact and management. Management efforts targeted solely at taxonomic metrics, such as contrasting the observed and expected number of species within a site or O/E ratios, have resulted in improvements in these measurements. However, it is necessary to consider the functional redundancy of these species, as measured through phylogenetic diversity, in order to further restore these sites. We highlight particular sites in need of additional attention, where concrete changes in management would likely yield the greatest increase in phylogenetic diversity and so ecosystem health, stability, and function.