Introduction Species extinction is becoming a threat to the biodiversity of ecosystems around the planet. Biodiversity preservation is essential for maintaining ecosystem productivity and providing biological resources. Phylogeny, the study of the evolutionary relationships between species, can provide useful information that may contribute to species preservation by helping to predict trends in species extinction.
The analysis of the phylogenetic tree of a group of organisms may provide significant information regarding the origins of a species and the origins of the traits that characterize the interactions between a species and its environment. Evaluation of the evolutionary relationships between species may indicate this information. In a study of bat extinction patterns using a phylogenetic comparative approach, levels of threat were found to be more similar among species within the same genera, genera within the same family, and families within the same suborder compared to species of different taxa (Jones et al. 2003). Similarly, a study focusing on the vulnerability of reef fishes to exploitation found species that decreased in abundance more than their nearest relative had greater maximum body size (Jennings et al. 1999). The phylogenetic analysis of these species indicated that the vulnerability to exploitation might be predicted based on responses of the relatives of these species of fish. Phylogenetic analysis of plants in Thoreau’s woods indicates that flower-time response traits are shared among closely related species
