One of the biggest challenges for conservation biology is to provide conservation planners
with ways to prioritize effort. Much attention has been focused on biodiversity hotspots.
However, the conservation of evolutionary process is now also acknowledged as a priority in
the face of global change. Phylogenetic diversity (PD) is a biodiversity index that measures
the length of evolutionary pathways that connect a given set of taxa,. PD therefore identifies
sets of taxa that maximize the accumulation of 'feature diversity'. Recent studies, however …