Properties of biodiversity indices that incorporate future extinction risk

Mike Steel; Kristina Wicke; Arne Mooers

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arXiv · 2602.16059

Properties of biodiversity indices that incorporate future extinction risk

Mike Steel·Kristina Wicke·Arne Mooers

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Abstract

The loss of biodiversity due to the likely widespread extinction of species in the near future is a focus of current concern in conservation biology. One approach to measure the impact of this extinction is based on the predicted loss of phylogenetic diversity. These predictions have become a focus of the Zoological Society of London's `EDGE2' program for quantifying biodiversity loss and involves considering the HED (heightened evolutionary distinctiveness) and HEDGE (heightened evolutionary distinctiveness and globally endangered) indices which are based on phylogenetic diversity on a tree. Here, we show how to generalise the HED(GE) indices by expanding their application to more general settings (to phylogenetic networks, to feature diversity on discrete traits, and to arbitrary biodiversity measures). We provide a simple and explicit description of the mean and, importantly, the variance of such measures, and illustrate our results by an application to the phylogeny and a small set of features for all 27 extant Crocodilians.

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Mike Steel, Kristina Wicke, Arne Mooers. 2026-02-17. Properties of biodiversity indices that incorporate future extinction risk. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16059

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