Rapid plant diversification: Planning for an evolutionary future

Systematic conservation planning is a branch of conservation biology that s eeks to identify spatially explicit options for the preservation of biodive rsity. Alternative systems of conservation areas are predictions about effe ctive ways of promoting the persistence of biodiversity; therefore, they sh ould consider not only biodiversity pattern but also the ecological and evo lutionary processes that maintain and generate species. Most research and a pplication, however, has focused on pattern representation only. This paper outlines the development of a conservation system designed to preserve bio diversity pattern and process in the context of a rapidly changing environm ent. The study area is the Cape Floristic Region (CFR), a biodiversity hots pot of global significance, located in southwestern Africa. This region has experienced rapid (post-Pliocene) ecological diversification of many plant lineages; there are numerous genera with large clusters of closely related species (flocks) that have subdivided habitats at a very fine scare. The c hallenge is to design conservation systems that will preserve both the patt ern of large numbers of species and various natural processes, including th e potential for lineage turnover. We outline an approach for designing a sy stem of conservation areas to incorporate the spatial components of the evo lutionary processes that maintain and generate biodiversity in the CFR. We discuss the difficulty of assessing the requirements for pattern versus pro cess representation in the face of ongoing threats to biodiversity, the dif ficulty of testing the predictions of alternative conservation systems, and the widespread need in conservation planning to incorporate and set target s for the spatial components (or surrogates) of processes.