Phylogenetically-informed crayfish conservation in the face of climate change

Abstract Crayfish are an ancient clade of freshwater decapods that play vital and diverse ecological roles in the freshwater systems that they inhabit. One third of assessed crayfish species are threatened with extinction and 87% are highly sensitive to climate change. However, the extent to which the evolutionary history of crayfish is threatened, especially by climate change, remains unclear. To address this, we produced a phylogenetically-informed species prioritisation for the conservation of crayfish and explored the consequences of projected climate change scenarios on crayfish phylogenetic diversity. We used the EDGE2 metric to highlight 70 priority species for conservation. Their combined threatened evolutionary history accounts for 40.7% of the expected phylogenetic diversity loss for all 673 crayfish. Of these priority species,…