Conserve IV

Assessing and prioritizing conservation schemes based on phylogenies.

Platforms & distributions

  • Mac executable
  • Windows executable
  • Linux executable

Repositories

Development status

Stable.

Latest version

See below.

Background

While it would be best to preserve all species and populations, in the management of biodiversity it is often necessary to perform a triage. Decisions must be made as to which populations, species and habitats should be given the highest priority.

Other things being equal, these priorities should be set on the basis of evolutionary distinctiveness, and Conserve enables you to do this using genetic distances and also to test whether particular assemblages of populations preserve statistically significantly more biodiversity than other assemblages.

Archaic versions of Conserve and some source code are also made available in the release directory.

Note

The numbering scheme inflicted upon Conserve requires some explanation. The current version of Conserve is actually the 4th iteration and full rewrite of the program. Thus it is sometimes referred to as Conserve IV. The archaic versions of Conserve that are still available are actually Conserve III. Both these series have their own internal version numbers. So Conserve IV, v1.3 is actually more recent than Conserve III, v3.2. Clear?

Releases