Madagascar is a known biodiversity hotspot, with a high endemism rate and threat level, and gaps still exist in the knowledge of its flora. Moreover, the Malagasy species and their habitats are under great threat, mainly because of human activities. Their conservation is therefore one of the greatest challenges that we are faced with. To achieve a more accurate definition of areas with high conservation priorities, we apply a multidisciplinary approach to the plant endemic genus Capurodendron (Sapotaceae), combining species modelling, phylogenetic inferences and IUCN threat Categories.

Capurodendron includes twenty to thirty species of slow-growing trees, which are primarily found in primary forests. The conservation of species of this genus is challenging since local communities widely used it as timber, therefore impacting the sustainability of natural populations.

Madagascar plants are overall undercollected and the current available herbaria collections of the genus do not provide sufficient distributional data. A modelling based on known occurrences and environmental data was therefore conducted to produce potential species distribution maps. IUCN threat Categories could thus be assigned to each species using two parameters derived from each map: extent of occurrence (area of the smallest polygon containing all known occurrences of a taxon) and area of occupancy (sum of the surface of all pixels at a given resolution where there are occurrences).

To take into account the species’ evolutionary history and the weight of each of them in the choice for priority areas, chloroplast and nuclear genes were sequenced and used to build a species tree under the Multi-Species Coalescent. The phylogenetic diversity contained in targeted areas was computed and helped defining priority areas.

This comprehensive approach is an attempt to find new ways to evaluate species threat levels when very few data is available and to define areas on which a conservation emphasis should be put, considering species’ distribution and phylogenetic diversity parameters."