Conserve v3.2.1 for the Macintosh
---------------------------------
At http://www.gen.latrobe.edu.au/Computing/software.html people can
download the latest version of Conserve, a Macintosh program that uses
phylogenetic information to calculate biodiversity and test the
feasability of conservation schemes.
What does it do?
----------------
While it would be best to preserve all species, in the management
of biodiversity it is often necessary to set priorities. Other
things being equal, these should be set on the basis of evolutionary
distinctiveness (a la Wilson), 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. Biodiversity is determined using GD (probability
of more than one allele) or PD (length of evolutionary history) methods,
from data in the form of unrooted trees produced in TREEFILE format, as
produced by various programs in the PHYLIP package. Taxa may be grouped
into sets using various options and the effects of removing species singly
or in sets determined. Multiple trees produced from the same data using
the bootstrap method in PHYLIP (using SEQBOOT) enables calculation of the
confidence limits for the biodiversity preserved by any assemblage.
The number of taxa is limited only by the size of your computer.
Why upgrade?
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Conserve 3 contains many GUI improvements over version 2 as well
significant speedups and better calculations. Users of earlier 3.x
versions are encouraged to upgrade to correct a few bugs.
http://www.gen.latrobe.edu.au/Computing/software.html
--
Paul-Michael Agapow (agapow at latcs1.oz.au), LaTrobe University, Melbourne
