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A Molecular Perspective on the Conservation of Diversity

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The Biology of Biodiversity

Abstract

The need to protect genetic variation, along with other hierarchical levels of biological diversity, is identified in numerous international conventions and national policies, but the concepts and information needed to achieve this goal are deficient. In a constantly changing world, conservation planning should seek to maintain evolutionary processes and the ecological function of systems essential to achieve this. For the purposes of assessment of conservation values of areas, I suggest that genetic diversity should be partitioned into adaptive and historical components. Surrogates such as morphological differentiation (e.g. congruent distributions of subspecies) tend to reflect the adaptive rather than the historical component of genetic diversity. Subject to ongoing viability of populations, the former is replaceable, whereas the latter is not. It follows that the identification of historically isolated communities through comparative phylogeography or, perhaps, environmental modelling is an important component of conservation assessments. This paper illustrates the application of comparative phylogeography to conservation assessments through two case studies; rainforest fauna in the wet tropics of Australia, and forest-dwelling herpetofauna in South-east Queensland. In both systems, mtDNA diversity is strongly partitioned among populations in a manner broadly consistent with environmental modelling, although they differ in the extent to which historical vicariance defines congruent distributions of diversity. Areas prioritised for conservation should encompass these historically isolated communities, together with strong environmental gradients within each.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Zoology and Entomology and the Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Rainforest Ecology and Management, The University of Queensland, Qld, 4072, Australia

    Craig Moritz

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  1. Craig Moritz
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Tokyo, 113-8654, Japan

    Masahiro Kato

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Tokyo

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Moritz, C. (2000). A Molecular Perspective on the Conservation of Diversity. In: Kato, M. (eds) The Biology of Biodiversity. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-65930-3_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-65930-3_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo

  • Print ISBN: 978-4-431-65932-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-4-431-65930-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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