Arne Mooers

Arne Mooers
Simon Fraser University · Department of Biological Sciences

D.Phil.

About

186
Publications
64,378
Reads
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12,676
Citations
Additional affiliations
October 1990 - June 1994
University of Oxford
Position
  • PhD Student
November 1997 - December 2000
University of Amsterdam
Position
  • Researcher
September 1994 - November 1997
University of British Columbia
Position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (186)
Article
Conservation prioritization has become increasingly important as a practical response to ongoing biodiversity loss and limited resources. One tool, evolutionary distinctiveness (ED) is based on a measure of evolutionary isolation and has merit for identifying taxa with few close relatives. Here we present the first ever national-level ED scores for...
Article
Full-text available
The conservation of evolutionary history has been linked to increased benefits for humanity and can be captured by phylogenetic diversity (PD). The Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) metric has, since 2007, been used to prioritise threatened species for practical conservation that embody large amounts of evolutionary history. Wh...
Article
Full-text available
In the simplest phylogenetic diversification model (the pure-birth Yule process), lineages split independently at a constant rate λ for time t. The length of a randomly chosen edge (either interior or pendant) in the resulting tree has an expected value that rapidly converges to 12λ as t grows, and thus is essentially independent of t. However, the...
Article
The translation of scientific data, analyses, and conclusions into public policy and social action almost always contains an implication of the investigator's ethics and values. Direct statements of these values are often deeply considered, but the ethical implications of structural constraints and upstream analytical choices are often hidden. This...
Preprint
Full-text available
The global biodiversity crisis threatens the natural world and its capacity to provide benefits to humans into the future. The conservation of evolutionary history, captured by the measure phylogenetic diversity (PD), is linked to the maintenance of these benefits and future options. The Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) metric...
Article
Full-text available
Aim The ecosystem functions and services of coral reefs are critical for coastal communities worldwide. Due to conservation resource limitation, species need to be prioritized to protect desirable properties of biodiversity, such as functional diversity (FD), which has been associated with greater ecosystem functioning but is difficult to quantify...
Article
Full-text available
Herbivore grazing is an important determinant of plant community assemblages. Thus, it is essential to understand its impact to direct conservation efforts in regions where herbivores are managed. While the impacts of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) grazing on plant biodiversity and community composition in the Fennoscandian tundra are well studied, t...
Article
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The Tree of Life will be irrevocably reshaped as anthropogenic extinctions continue to unfold. Theory suggests that lineage evolutionary dynamics, such as age since origination, historical extinction filters and speciation rates, have influenced ancient extinction patterns – but whether these factors also contribute to modern extinction risk is lar...
Preprint
Full-text available
Species are the main unit used to measure biodiversity, but different preferred diagnostic criteria can lead to very different delineations. For instance, named primate species have more than doubled since 1982. Such increases have been termed "taxonomic inflation" and have been attributed to the widespread adoption of the ′phylogenetic species con...
Article
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Identifying the factors that influence species diversification is fundamental to our understanding of the evolutionary processes underlying extant biodiversity. Behavioural innovation, coupled with the social transmission of new behaviours, has been proposed to increase rates of evolutionary diversification, as novel behaviours expose populations t...
Article
Amphibian health problems of unknown cause limit the success of the growing number of captive breeding programs. Spindly leg syndrome (SLS) is one such disease, where affected individuals with underdeveloped limbs often require euthanization. We experimentally evaluated husbandry-related factors of SLS in a captive population of the critically enda...
Preprint
Full-text available
Understanding impacts on species diversification is fundamental to our understanding of the evolutionary processes underlying biodiversity. The ‘behavioural drive hypothesis’ posits that behavioural innovation, coupled with the social transmission of innovative behaviours, can increase rates of evolution and diversification, as novel behaviours exp...
Article
Full-text available
The extent to which phylogenetic diversity (PD) captures feature diversity (FD) is a topical and controversial question in biodiversity conservation. In this short paper, we formalise this question and establish a precise mathematical condition for FD (based on discrete characters) to coincide with PD. In this way, we make explicit the two main rea...
Article
Full-text available
Based on the number of words per meaning across the Indo-European Swadesh list, Pagel et al. (2007) suggest that frequency of use is a general mechanism of linguistic evolution. We test this claim using within-language change. From the IDS ( Key & Comrie 2015 ) we compiled a comparative word list of 1,147 cognate pairs for Classical Latin and Moder...
Article
Full-text available
Population decline is a process, yet estimates of current extinction rates often consider just the final step of that process by counting numbers of species lost in historical times. This neglects the increased extinction risk that affects a large proportion of species, and consequently underestimates the effective extinction rate. Here, we model o...
Article
Full-text available
Salamanders have some of the largest, and most variable, genome sizes among the vertebrates. Larger genomes have been associated with larger cell sizes, lower metabolic rates, and longer embryonic and larval durations in many different taxonomic groups. These life-history traits are often important for dictating fitness under different environmenta...
Article
Full-text available
British Columbia has the greatest biological diversity of any province or territory in Canada. Yet increasing numbers of species in British Columbia are threatened with extinction. The current patchwork of provincial laws and regulations has not effectively prevented species declines. Recently, the Provincial Government has committed to enacting an...
Article
Zoos have played a pivotal role in the successful reinforcement and reintroduction of species threatened with extinction, but prioritization is required in the face of increasing need and limited capacity. One means of prioritizing between species of equal threat status when establishing new breeding programs is the consideration of evolutionary di...
Article
Full-text available
The original version of this Article contained a plotting error in Fig. 3g. The Serranidae and Siganidae families were misplaced in the plotted phylogeny. This error has now been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of the Article. For comparison, the original, incorrect version of Fig. 3g is presented below as Fig. 1. The authors thank P. Cowman...
Technical Report
Full-text available
British Columbia has the greatest biological diversity of any province or territory in Canada. Yet more and more species in British Columbia are threatened with extinction and require active measures for protection and recovery. The current patchwork of provincial laws and regulations managing wildlife and their habitats has not effectively prevent...
Article
Full-text available
Humans continue to alter terrestrial ecosystems, but our understanding of how biodiversity responds is still limited. Anthropogenic habitat conversion has been associated with the loss of evolutionarily distinct bird species at local scales, but whether this evolutionary pattern holds across other clades is unknown. We collate a global dataset on a...
Article
Full-text available
Efficient forward-looking mitigation measures are needed to halt the global biodiversity decline. These require spatially explicit scenarios of expected changes in multiple indicators of biodiversity under future socio-economic and environmental conditions. Here, we link six future (2050 and 2100) global gridded maps (0.25° × 0.25° resolution) avai...
Preprint
Full-text available
Faced with the challenge of saving as much diversity as possible given financial and time constraints, conservation biologists are increasingly prioritizing species on the basis of their overall contribution to evolutionary diversity. Metrics such as EDGE (Evolutionary Distinct and Globally Endangered) have been used to set such evolutionarily-base...
Article
Full-text available
In the face of the biodiversity crisis, it is argued that we should prioritize species in order to capture high functional diversity (FD). Because species traits often reflect shared evolutionary history, many researchers have assumed that maximizing phylogenetic diversity (PD) should indirectly capture FD, a hypothesis that we name the "phylogenet...
Article
Full-text available
New species of marine fishes are found to emerge at a faster rate in high-latitude oceans, which have lower densities of species, than in the species-rich tropics. Are the tropics too crowded for new species to take hold? New species of marine fishes are found to emerge at a faster rate in high-latitude oceans, which have lower densities of species...
Preprint
Full-text available
Efficient forward-looking mitigation measures are needed to halt the global biodiversity decline. These require spatially explicit scenarios of expected changes in multiple indicators of biodiversity under future socio-economic and environmental conditions. Here we link five future (2050 and 2100) global gridded maps (0.25° × 0.25° resolution) avai...
Preprint
Full-text available
In the face of the biodiversity crisis, it is argued that we should prioritize species in order to capture high functional diversity (FD). Because species traits often reflect shared evolutionary history, many researchers have advocated for a “phylogenetic gambit”: maximizing phylogenetic diversity (PD) should indirectly capture FD. For the first t...
Article
Full-text available
In an era of accelerated biodiversity loss and limited conservation resources, systematic prioritization of species and places is essential. In terrestrial vertebrates, evolutionary distinctness has been used to identify species and locations that embody the greatest share of evolutionary history. We estimate evolutionary distinctness for a large m...
Article
This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/nature24295. The correction is a simple change in the abstract, where the subeditors had wrongly changed the description of the study period. The correct period is that described in the Methods: funding levels and socioeconomic predictors for 1992-2003 were used to explain biodiversity change for 1996-2008 (20...
Article
Full-text available
Continuously varying traits such as body size or gene expression level evolve during the history of species or gene lineages. To test hypotheses about the evolution of such traits, the maximum likelihood (ML) method is often used. Here we introduce CoMET (Continuous-character Model Evaluation and Testing), which is module for Mesquite that automate...
Article
Full-text available
Halting global biodiversity loss is central to the Convention on Biological Diversity and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, but success to date has been very limited. A critical determinant of success in achieving these goals is the financing that is committed to maintaining biodiversity; however, financing decisions are hindered by con...
Article
The extinction of species at the present leads to the loss of 'phylogenetic diversity' (PD) from the evolutionary tree in which these species lie. Prior to extinction, the total PD present can be divided up among the species in various ways using measures of evolutionary isolation (such as 'fair proportion' and 'equal splits'). However, the loss of...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Recent studies have mapped the global hotspots hosting high phylogenetic diversity ( PD ), but not the regions where this diversity is under threat due to human land use. This is because, to date, it is not clear how much PD is lost as species of a given taxon go extinct. The aim of this study was to identify the global regions projected to suf...
Article
Full-text available
The fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) has emerged as a major agent of amphibian extinction, requiring conservation intervention for many susceptible species. Identifying susceptible species is challenging, but many aspects of species’ biology are predicted to influence the evolution of host resistance, tolerance, or avoidance stra...
Article
For decades, academic biologists have advocated for making conservation decisions in light of evolutionary history. Specifically, they suggest that policymakers should prioritize conserving phylogenetically diverse assemblages. The most prominent argument is that conserving phylogenetic diversity (PD) will also conserve diversity in traits and feat...
Preprint
Full-text available
The extinction of species at the present leads to the loss of ‘phylogenetic diversity’ (PD) from the evolutionary tree in which these species lie. Prior to extinction, the total PD present can be divided up among the species in various ways using measures of evolutionary isolation (such as ‘fair proportion’ and ‘equal splits’). However, the loss of...
Preprint
Full-text available
For decades, academic biologists have advocated for making conservation decisions in light of evolutionary history. Specifically, they suggest that policymakers should prioritize conserving phylogenetically diverse assemblages. The most prominent argument is that conserving phylogenetic diversity (PD) will also conserve diversity in traits and feat...
Article
Full-text available
Many of the traits associated with elevated rates of speciation, including niche specialization and having small and isolated populations, are similarly linked with an elevated risk of extinction. This suggests that rapidly speciating lineages may also be more extinction prone. Empirical tests of a speciation-extinction correlation are rare because...
Data
Table S1. Twenty amphibian genera with all assessed species at risk, and therefore facing potential lineage extinction, indicating the species richness and phylogenetic diversity (PD) within each group, the lineage's stem age, and the potential prevention of PD loss by saving one species within each clade (PD saved).
Article
Full-text available
In the midst of the current biodiversity crisis, conservation efforts might profitably be directed towards ensuring that extinctions do not result in inordinate losses of evolutionary history. Numerous methods have been developed to evaluate the importance of species based on their contribution to total phylogenetic diversity on trees and networks,...
Data
Pairwise values of φST among species Pairwise values of fST among species, calculated using the Kimura 2-parameter model. Each value is significant at p < 0.001, except between darwini and becki, which is significant at p < 0.05.
Data
Depictions of the relationships among Galápagos tortoise species from previous studies in comparison to the splits networks generated from control region and microsatellite datasets Depictions of (A) the relationships among Galápagos tortoise species resolved by previous studies (Beheregaray et al., 2004; Caccone et al., 2002; Russello et al., 2005...
Article
Homo naledi is a recently discovered species of fossil hominin from South Africa. A considerable amount is already known about H. naledi but some important questions remain unanswered. Here we report a study that addressed two of them: “Where does H. naledi fit in the hominin evolutionary tree?” and “How old is it?” We used a large supermatrix of c...
Article
Full-text available
The joint use of phylogenetic trees and ecological data has proven useful for many aspects of ecology. However, there are a multitude of phylo-diversity metrics with complex interdependencies and mathematical redundancies (the so-called textquoteleftjungletextquoteright of metrics). Several recent papers have been trying to textquoteleftmaptextquot...
Article
Full-text available
The use of phylogenies in ecology is increasingly common and has broadened our understanding of biological diversity. Ecological sub‐disciplines, particularly conservation, community ecology and macroecology, all recognize the value of evolutionary relationships but the resulting development of phylogenetic approaches has led to a proliferation of...
Article
Full-text available
The 'edge of existence' (EDGE) prioritisation scheme is a new approach to rank species for conservation attention that aims to identify species that are both isolated on the tree of life and at imminent risk of extinction as defined by the World Conservation Union (IUCN). The self-stated benefit of the EDGE system is that it effectively captures un...
Article
Full-text available
The phylogenetic relationships of several hominin species remain controversial. Two methodological issues contribute to the uncertainty-use of partial, inconsistent datasets and reliance on phylogenetic methods that are ill-suited to testing competing hypotheses. Here, we report a study designed to overcome these issues. We first compiled a superma...
Article
Read the Feature Paper: Setting evolutionary‐based conservation priorities for a phylogenetically data‐poor taxonomic group (Scleractinia); other Commentaries on this paper: Conservation prioritization in the context of uncertainty; Regional specific approach is a next step for setting evolutionary‐based conservation priorities in the scleractinian...
Article
The phylogeny of Galliformes (landfowl) has been studied extensively; however, the associated chronologies have been criticized recently due to misplaced or misidentified fossil calibrations. As a consequence, it is unclear whether any crown-group lineages arose in the Cretaceous and survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg; 65.5 Ma) mass extinction...
Article
Full-text available
Background The value of a continuous character evolving on a phylogenetic tree is commonly modelled as the location of a particle moving under one-dimensional Brownian motion with constant rate. The Brownian motion model is best suited to characters evolving under neutral drift or tracking an optimum that drifts neutrally. We present a generalizati...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding how to prioritize among the most deserving imperilled species has been a focus of biodiversity science for the past three decades. Though global metrics that integrate evolutionary history and likelihood of loss have been successfully implemented, conservation is typically carried out at sub-global scales on communities of species rat...
Article
Full-text available
Conservation planning needs to account for limited resources when choosing those species on which to focus attention and resources. Currently, funding is biased to small sections of the tree of life, such as raptors and carnivores. One new approach for increasing the diversity of species under consideration considers how many close relatives a spec...
Article
Full-text available
Background The Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE) predicts that gestation duration, lactation duration, and their sum, total development time, are constrained by mass-specific basal metabolic rate such that they should scale with body mass with an exponent of 0.25. However, tests of the MTE’s predictions have yielded mixed results. In an effort to r...
Data
Figure S1. The phylogenic hypotheses generated for the plant communities used in this analysis.
Data
Figure S2. Communities used in these analyses are global in scope (see Table 1).
Data
Figure S3. A breakdown of RNRI for the different orders examined in this study (grouped by community).
Article
Full-text available
Integrated, efficient, and global prioritization approaches are necessary to manage the ongoing loss of species and their associated function. "Evolutionary distinctness" measures a species' contribution to the total evolutionary history of its clade and is expected to capture uniquely divergent genomes and functions. Here we demonstrate how such a...
Article
Full-text available
In the face of inevitable future losses to biodiversity, ranking species by conservation priority seems more than prudent. Setting conservation priorities within species (i.e., at the population level) may be critical as species ranges become fragmented and connectivity declines. However, existing approaches to prioritization (e.g., scoring organis...
Article
Full-text available
Global climate shifts and ecological flexibility are two major factors that may affect rates of speciation and extinction across clades. Here, we connect past climate to changes in diet and diversification dynamics of ruminant mammals. Using novel versions of Multi-State Speciation and Extinction models, we explore the most likely scenarios for evo...
Article
Phylogenetic trees that include all member lineages are necessary for many questions in macroevolution, biogeography and conservation. Currently, producing such trees when genetic data or phenotypic characters for some tips are missing generally involves assigning missing species to the root of their most exclusive clade, essentially grafting them...
Article
Full-text available
The News & Analysis stories “Fragile wetland will test Turkey's resolve in protecting biodiversity” and “For scientists, protests morph into fight for academic freedom” (J. Bohannon, 26 July, p. [332][1]) deserve to be set in a wider context. Turkey is covered by three global biodiversity