In setting conservation priorities for a taxon a range of factors need to be considered, including threatened status, endemicity, rarity, charisma, function in ecosystem and genetic diversity. When trying to determine which strategy will conserve the greatest extent of independent evolutionary life, phylogenetic distance methods can be used as they reveal the genetic uniqueness of a taxon. The evolutionary distinctiveness measure, for example, can be calculated for groups of taxa, of different Eukaryotic kingdoms, based on the length of each branch of a phylogenetic tree. By combining evolutionary distinctiveness (ED) with the extinction risk Globally Endangered (GE), Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) scores can be computed for designing conservation strategies (see www.edgeofexistence.org).
The availability of genetic data resources linked to a large and reliable repository of taxonomy is therefore essential for phylogenetically informed conservation strategies. During 2010–2013 the EU Indexing for Life (i4Life) project (www.i4life.eu), coordinated at the University of Reading, UK, established a virtual research community to enable six partners to engage in a programme to enumerate the extent of life. The partners were the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory–European Bioinformatics Institute, IUCN, LifeWatch, the Encyclopedia of Life, and the Barcode of Life programme.
The project built on the common need of these partners to access high-quality taxonomic data in the partnership's databases, and was a European e-Infrastructure project, co-funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. For each of the partners i4Life designed and implemented the necessary tools, as well as significantly enhancing the Catalogue of Life (www.catalogueoflife.org).
The i4Life project also established a set of tools and standards for data sharing and cooperation among major biodiversity programmes. Tools developed included a download service, a cross-mapper for comparing different taxonomies and a piping tool that accepts taxa centrally and then ‘pipes’ them out to c. 130 global species checklists for processing (http://www.i4life.eu/i4lifewebsite/col-piping-tools/). These tools facilitated the cross-referencing of the partners' taxon names with the taxonomically edited Catalogue of Life list, and a gap analysis of taxonomic coverage among the partners to identify taxa missing from the Catalogue of Life, and helped complete the taxon lists in the partners' taxonomic data.
The i4Life project is a major achievement in biodiversity informatics as it ensures a higher quality of taxonomic data in the databases of the project's partners and facilitates the usability of genetic data resources essential for conducting phylogenetically informed conservation strategies such as EDGE. In this regard the European Molecular Biology Laboratory–European Bioinformatics Institute European Nucleotide Archive has recently developed a marker portal from which phylogenetic marker sequences can be downloaded (www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/warehouse/search).
