Ecosystem functioning and its resilience to environmental changes is not just determined by species richness, but by the functional trait diversity that characterizes these species. Comprehensive functional trait data is however lacking and resource-intensive to obtain. Phylogenetic diversity (PD), a measure of biodiversity that reflects how evolutionary related species are, can be a good indicator for community functional diversity. Faith’s PD is calculated as the sum of the lengths of the phylogenetic tree branches representing the minimum phylogenetic tree-spanning path among a group of species, but multiple other estimators for PD exist.

No scientific consensus exists on which biodiversity measure should be monitored in light of attempts to halt biodiversity loss. There is a real need to provide workflows that can calculate these metrics rapidly, so their behaviour can be studied under different situations and scales. We will outline a workflow to calculate a spatial indicator for phylogenetic diversity, which we developed as part of the B-Cubed project (Biodiversity Building Blocks for Policy). B-Cubed centers around using data cubes to overcome the problems of data incompleteness and varying sampling effort in calculating such metrics. Data cubes are analysis-ready biodiversity datasets that ease the interpretation of data for effective management and policy decisions.

This workflow will be used to visualize phylogenetic diversity per grid cell on a map and calculate the overlap between high phylogenetic diversity grid cells and currently protected areas. Policymakers and other stakeholders like NGO’s and biodiversity managers can use the resulting tool to assess to which degree phylogenetic diversity is currently safeguarded and identify potential directions for future expansion of those protected areas.