Format: ORAL

Brent D. Mishler1, Ixchel Gonzlez-Ramrez1, John Mclaughlin2, Benjamin Carter2, Israel Borokini3

1 University and Jepson Herbaria, University of California, Berkeley, USA 2 Sharsmith Herbarium, San Jose State University, USA 3 Department of Ecology, Montana State University, Bozeman, USA

California is one of the worlds biodiversity hotspots. It is also one of the places where biodiversity is most threatened, because of habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change. There is an urgent need to understand conservation priorities on the landscape of California for all groups of organisms, yet no such study has been made for mosses or liverworts. Bryophytes are indicators of ecosystem health, and contribute significantly to nutrient and water cycles. Therefore, we carried out spatial phylogenetic analyses for both groups. For mosses we pruned a larger spatial dataset of geo-referenced herbarium records for North America, plus matching phylogenetic data matrix, from Carter et al. (2022, Journal of Biogeography, 10.1111/jbi.14385) to make a California subset. For liverworts we assembled a new spatial data set from GBIF and mined molecular data from Genbank. A maximum likelihood phylogeny was constructed for both groups and used along with newly produced species niche models to find regions of significant phylogenetic diversity and phylogenetic endemism within California, employing a spatial randomization. We also carried out phylogenetic complementarity analyses to identify conservation priorities on the landscape that optimally increase protected biodiversity, using an algorithm that considers current land protection status and data on landscape intactness to identify priority sites containing concentrations of lineages that are evolutionarily unique, vulnerable due to small range size, and poorly protected across their ranges. We evaluated priorities using three different dimensions of phylodiversity): a phylogram (i.e., genetic divergence), a chronogram (i.e., evolutionary time), or a cladogram (i.e., speciation events). These metrics yielded conservation priorities that agreed in many places but differed in others. We compare these results to those previously published for vascular plants of California (Kling et al. 2018, Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. B, 374: 20170397). Several top priority regions of the state emerged from these comparisons.