Simon Veron

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle · Département Écologie et Gestion de la Biodiversité

Protected areas are mainly designed to maintain species richness and/or rare, vulnerable species. Yet these criteria may not be sufficient to conserve the diverse facets of biodiversity, especially phylogenetic diversity and the functions it provides. Protecting the evolutionary history shared by species has been argued to be highly valuable to con...

Background Phylogenetic diversity and evolutionary distinctiveness are highly valuable components of biodiversity, but they are rarely considered in conservation practices. Focusing on a biodiversity hotspot, the Mediterranean Basin, we aimed to identify those areas where evolutionary history is highly threatened and range-restricted in the region...

Assessment methods have been developed to estimate a preliminary conservation status for species and subsequently to facilitate the building of Red Lists. Such pre-assessment methods could be particularly useful in the French Overseas Territories (FOTs) where Red Lists tend to be out-dated or absent and where a high number of endemic species face d...

TAXREF is the taxonomic register for all living organisms from metropolitain and overseas France, marine as well as continental. A new version is published each year. This 15th version can be downloaded here : https://inpn.mnhn.fr/telechargement/referentielEspece/taxref/15.0/menu

Curbing biodiversity loss and its impact on ecosystem services, resilience and Nature’s Contributions to People is one of the main challenges of our generation (IPBES, 2019b, 2019a; Secretariat of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, 2020). A global baseline assessment of the threat status of all of biodiversity is crucial to moni...

Functionally and evolutionarily distinct species have traits or an evolutionary history that are shared by few others in a given set, which make them priority species for biodiversity conservation. On islands, life in isolation has led to the evolution of many distinct forms and functions as well as to a high level of endemism. The aim of this stud...

Various prioritisation strategies have been developed to cope with accelerating biodiversity loss and limited conservation resources. These strategies could become more engaging for decision-makers if they reflected the positive effects conservation can have on future projected biodiversity, by targeting net positive outcomes in future projected bi...

A broad range of climatic and biogeographical conditions are represented in the French Overseas Territories, from sub-polar to equatorial, resulting in a high diversity of endemic species. We mobilized data from herbaria, floras, checklists, literature, the expertise of botanists and plant ecologists to compile the most complete dataset on endemic...

Island systems are among the most vulnerable to climate change, which is predicted to induce shifts in temperature, rainfall and/or sea levels. Our aim was: (i) to map the relative vulnerability of islands to each of these threats from climate change on a worldwide scale; (ii) to estimate how island vulnerability would impact phylogenetic diversity...

Islands have remarkable levels of endemism and contribute greatly to global biodiversity. Establishing the age of island endemics is important to gain insights into the processes that have shaped the biodiversity patterns of island biota. We investigated the relative age of monocots across islands worldwide, using different measures of phylogenetic...

At their early age, a large proportion of island pools were a partial sampling of mainland pools whatever islands are oceanic or fragments of the mainland. Through time, colonization, diversification, extinctions, have deeply transformed insular and continental communities and therefore the degree to which they share species. We studied the relativ...

The use of phylogenetic tools and studies has strongly increased in the last two decades especially in conservation biology and community ecology. Phylogenetic trees are essential to understand the processes of community or network assembly, to identify centers of diversification, and to help protect Earth’s evolutionary heritage. Despite two decad...

Changes in species concepts and the rapid advances in DNA-based taxonomy and phylogeny of the past decades have led to increasing splits of single species into several new species. The consequences of such splits include the delineation of post-split species that may have restricted ranges and potentially increased extinction risks. Species splitti...

PD or “phylogenetic diversity” was proposed by Faith (Biol Conserv 61:1–10, 1992) as a measure of biodiversity “option value”, justifying its importance as a target of biodiversity conservation. The threats to phylogenetic diversity can be quantified by integrating PD with IUCN Red List categories and corresponding inferred extinction probabilities...

Phylogenetic diversity (PD) is a valuable component of biodiversity, reflecting variation produced by past evolutionary processes and providing options for future generations. A challenge is to design and implement effective conservation actions for the preservation of PD for multiple taxonomic groups. We here proposed a region-level approach to th...

An important bias in the estimations of threatened evolutionary history is that extinctions are considered as independent events. However, the extinction of a given species may affect the vulnerability of its partners and cause extinction cascades. Co-extinctions are likely not random in the tree of life and may cause the loss of large amounts of u...

An important bias in the estimations of threatened evolutionary history is that extinctions are considered as independent events. However, the extinction of a given species may affect the vulnerability of its partners and cause extinction cascades. Co-extinctions are likely not random in the tree of life and may cause the loss of large amounts of u...

The field of biodiversity conservation has recently been criticised as relying on a fixist view of the living world, in which existing species constitute the targets of conservation efforts and simultaneously static states of reference, which is in apparent disagreement with evolutionary dynamics. Here, we argue that the ethical and theoretical fra...

There is an increasing interest in measuring loss of phylogenetic diversity and evolutionary distinctiveness which together depict the evolutionary history of conservation interest. Those losses are assessed through the evolutionary relationships between species and species threat status or extinction probabilities. Yet, available information is no...

The Earth's evolutionary history is threatened by species loss in the current sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history. Such extinction events not only eliminate species but also their unique evolutionary histories. Here we review the expected loss of Earth's evolutionary history quantified by phylogenetic diversity (PD) and evolutionary dist...

A major objective for biologists is to identify the most threatened species in order to define and prioritize conservation actions. In this aim, the Red List developed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) enables to identify species at risk of extinction and has supported a large number of conservation programs (IUCN, 20...