Grants and residencies Research Prioritisation of African elapoid snakes for conservation using novel phylogenetic and functional diversity metrics Main applicant Doctoral researcher Das Sunandan Amount of funding 60000 € Type of funding General grant call Fields Environmental science, biological, chemical and physical Grant year 2021 Duration Two years If you are this project's responsible person, you can sign in and add more information. Log in Share: Back to Grants listing Application summary We are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate. Unfortunately, it is impractical, in terms of resources, to aim conservation support to all the species. Therefore, we need to prioritise a subset of all the species for conservation. It is necessary for such prioritisation to be biologically meaningful. One of the most important prioritisation metrics is Phylogenetic diversity (PD) which seeks to maximise trait diversity and thus, option value for future. Though theoretically appealing, the actual ability of PD in terms of capturing adequate functional diversity (FD) and ensuring taxonomic diversity over a long stretch of time has recently been questioned. However, proponents of these opposing camps have the same objective (i.e., effective conservation planning) and PD and FD both have properties desirable for prioritising species for conservation. Therefore, I propose that a reconciliation is possible. Elapoidea is a superfamily of snakes with several clades in Africa. I am currently sequencing conserved elements of their genome to infer a phylogeny. I plan to use to phylogeny to compute PD for reduced sets of taxa. I also aim to compute FD, as functional richness, for the same reduced taxon sets. In the method that I propose, only those taxon sets with a significantly high PD and FD will be retained for downstream analyses. In a second round of filtering that will follow, only those taxon sets will be kept which have identical sets of species between the filtered PD and FD. From these taxon sets, three new metrics will be calculated which prioritises species sets for conservation with high degree of both PD and FD. This proposal is bold as it is the first attempt to prioritise species for conservation without compromising on either PD or FD and is guaranteed to always result in PD and FD which are better than it would have been if the taxa are chosen randomly or based on non-biological criteria. Hence, this method can usher in a new era of conservation planning. Project report summary The funded project aimed to infer the phylogenetic relationships of the snake superfamily Elapoidea and then use the phylogeny to prioritise snakes from this group for conservation action. The phylogenomics part of our investigation resulted in very major and unexpected discoveries. Using a target capture genomic dataset of unprecedented (for snakes) size for elapoid snakes, we discovered the presence of three entirely new families of snakes! We have already published the phylogeny and the formal systematic description of two of these families (the third one is in preparation). Discovery of entire vertebrate families is a once-in-a-century phenomenon in the 21st century which led Newsweek to term our discoveries as 'lifetime achievement' in their press coverage. Inference of such a comprehensive phylogeny of elapoid snakes, which forms the bulk of the serpent fauna in Africa and Madagascar and publication of a major life history trait database by a different research group allowed me to broaden the scope of the second part of this project, i.e., conservation prioritisation, to the entire Serpentes of Afro-Malagasy region. We have applied a new algorithm of phylogenetic diversity that can take hybridisation into account on a comprehensive Afro-Malagasy snake phylogeny (majority of which are elapoid snakes) and are in the process of preparation of a manuscript. The project resulted in two published papers and two more manuscripts are currently in preparation. Major discoveries from this project also garnered widespread media attention. Back to Grants listing