Key Points
Maybe 1 million species are atrisk of extinction..
Rikki Gumbs, a conservationist at the Zoological Society of London, argues that we should be focusing more on species that are both evolutionarily distinctand endangered..
Plus, Gumbs wanted a way for the EDGE metric to rank species whose conservation status is unknownwhich is the case for the vast majority of the worlds creatures..
One growing focus, Gumbs says, is protecting whole ecosystems that preserve lots of evolutionarily distinct plants and animals rather than concentrating on single species...
Molina Venegas work has found that if we pick plant species based on their evolutionary uniqueness, wed end up protecting more plant species that areuseful to humans than if we took a random approach to picking species..
