Project Overview
Background: we are facing an unprecedented biodiversity crisis, which is likely to aggravate.
Biodiversity is key to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 15 – Life on Earth – and also co-benefits most of the other SDGs. To face this crisis, policymakers are urged to expand the global protected areas network (PAs) to cover at least 30% of terrestrial land. Although such expansion could likely improve biodiversity preservation, it may also impose trade-offs with other Sustainable Development Goal. Guidance is needed to identify which areas have the potential to generate the greatest synergies between conserving biodiversity and other Sustainable Development Goals.
Intra-specific genetic diversity is one of the biodiversity pillars.
It underlies species’ adaptation and survival, ecosystem resilience, and nature’s contribution to people. However, there is still a shortfall of knowledge about which species contain distinct evolutionary lineages and about the broadscale patterns of Intra-specific genetic diversity and their underlying evolutionary and ecological processes. This hinders the evaluation of the effectiveness of current PAs in representing Intra-specific genetic diversity.
Objectives
PLACES aims at advancing knowledge of biogeographic patterns of Intra-specific genetic diversity of herptiles and their underlying processes and developing new methods and computational tools to aid decision-making towards sustainability.
PLACES will focus on the Intra-specific genetic diversity of herptiles in 6 regions: the Iberian Peninsula, Northwestern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Madagascar, Northern Australia and Brazilian Atlantic-forest. These regions have been intensively studied by members of our team and are examples of where robust phylogeographies of multiple co-occurring species are available, with genetic data covering representative parts of the overall species ranges. For some species, tissue samples have already been collected in the field but are yet to be analyzed, opening opportunities to infer novel phylogeographies and complement existing datasets.
PLACES has four specific objectives:
1. Reduce the shortfall of knowledge of patterns of Intra-specific genetic diversity of herptiles.
2. Identify the evolutionary, ecological, and environmental factors that determine Intra-specific genetic diversity and cryptic species.
3. Develop a novel optimization method and computational tool to maximize co-benefits and reduce trade-offs of Intra-specific genetic diversity conservation with other Sustainable Development Goals.
4. Provide guidelines to policymakers for incorporating evolutionary perspectives into the post-2020 biodiversity conservation agenda.