Format: ORAL

Sebastian Pipins1,2,3, Alex Bowmer2,4,Rikki Gumbs3,5, Ian Ondo1,6, Nisha Owen7, Sam Pironon1,6, James Rosindell3, Felix Forest1

1 Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, London, UK 2 On the Edge, London, UK 3 Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, UK 4 The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK 5 EDGE of Existence Programme, London, UK 6 UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Cambridge, UK 7 Global Greengrants Fund, UK

The biodiversity crisis is set to prune the Tree of Life in a way that threatens billions of years of evolutionary history. To secure this heritage along with all the benefits it provides to humanity, there is need for conservation prioritisations to be informed by phylogenetics. Furthermore, it is typical for prioritisations to report on vertebrate diversity, biasing our attention away from plants. Here, we contrast global priorities of threatened evolutionary history for seed plants and tetrapod animals, highlighting areas of shared priority and unique concern. We then reveal patterns of Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) species and consider how areas of shared priority disaggregate at the sub-national scale. With the EDGE index featuring under Target 4 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, it is vital to ensure the worlds most unique and imperilled species are safeguarded. This study therefore presents an important examination of the potential synergies to be found in conserving across the Tree of Life.