Dr. Nisha Owen is Executive Director at the environmental and climate justice funder Global Greengrants Fund UK, a conservationist with almost two decades of experience championing locally-led efforts ...
IUCN SSC Phylogenetic Diversity Task Force

Overview and description
- Description:
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The Tree of Life is a storehouse of potential benefits to humanity and protecting it ensures that we protect these benefits into the future. The PDTF seeks to promote the importance of conserving ...
Group leadership
More about the Task Force
The IUCN SSC Phylogenetic Diversity Task Force (‘PDTF’) aims to provide leadership and guidance on the inclusion of phylogenetic diversity (PD) in conservation strategies.
Conserving the Tree of Life and our evolutionary heritage: Phylogenetic diversity (PD) measures the evolutionary history captured by a set of species and therefore describes a fundamental aspect of biodiversity; the diversity of features produced by the course of evolution (Faith 1992). The ...

The PDTF promotes the importance of conserving phylogenetic diversity, and so the tree of life and our evolutionary heritage.
Task Force work
The PDTF supports implementation and provides guidance and advice for practitioners and decision-makers on appropriate PD approaches, incorporating PD into policy and encouraging scientific research and conservation applications that will add to the knowledge base.
Measuring success of PD-based conservation
PDTF develops state-of-the-art methods for measuring and categorising the success of conservation.
Incorporating Phylogenetic Diversity into policy
PDTF supports knowledge-exchange to advance adoption of Phylogenetic Diversity prioritisation.
Promoting the importance of the Tree of Life
PDTF shares information and enhances the understanding of the Tree of Life.
2022 PDTF Annual Report
Learn about PDTF’s work and results in 2022.
Previous reports:
2021 PDTF Annual Report
2019 PDTF Annual Report
Projects of the Task Force
PDTF Indicator Submission to the CBD
The PDTF has developed two indicators for monitoring our success at conserving the tree of life, which can be used in national and global conservation policy. These have been submitted for consideration in the CBD post-2020 biodiversity framework. The indicators explicitly and uniquely interlink Goal A (preventing extinctions and improving conservation status) and Goal B (valuing nature’s contributions to people), filling an important current gap in the draft monitoring framework relating to Nature’s Contributions to People, as well as the lack of linkages with IPBES’s work to date. Our indicators recognise both phylogenetic diversity as a valuable aspect of biodiversity, and the neglected species that represent our evolutionary history; enabling conservation, measurement and monitoring into the future. Read about the indicators.
WCC Panel event
In a celebration in all things weird and wonderful, the PDTF participated in a panel discussion held at the IUCN WCC, Reverse the Red Pavilion on the 7th of September, 2021. The panel was chaired by Monni Bohm of the Indianapolis Zoo and attended by Nisha Owen of On the EDGE, Roseli Pellens of the Muséum National d’Histoire naturelle, Andrew Terry of the Zoological Society of London and Barney Long of Re:wild. The speakers shared theirs views on why we should concentrate conservation efforts on conserving overlooked species across the tree of life.
Supporting the SSC EDGE grant
The PDTF provides technical expertise to the SSC EDGE grant, which supports assessments and action planning for evolutionarily distinct species and lineages among the IUCN SSC groups. The PDTF provides up-to-date lists of priority species, expertise and guidance, which has to date led to a wide selection of projects that include under-represented taxa as well as promoting the involvement of range-state practitioners.