To evaluate the diversity of an area using phylogenies as a general frame, two main perspectives could be used, evolutionary distinctiveness (ED) or phylogenetic diversity ( PD ). Evolutionary distinctiveness refers to species-specifi c measures developed to assign scores to the species and therefore the areas they inhabit (Vane-Wright et al. 1991 ). The measures are topology -based indices, calculated as "the sum of basic taxic weights, Q, and the sum of standardised taxic weights, W." (Schweiger et al. 2008 ), and therefore are also known as Taxonomic distinctiveness indices. Phylogenetic diversity (PD) is a distance-based index using minimum spanning path of the subset in the tree (Faith 1992 ). Redding et al. ( 2008 ) identifi ed some of the major differences between ED and PD. PD is effective only if all the species within the optimal subset are protected, otherwise other optimal subsets are possible; unlike ED, PD is not species-specifi c and thus does not offer priority species rankings, which are important to species conservation approaches as the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Furthermore, topologies are more stable than branch length s. Increasing the number of characters or changing the set of characters seldom leads to entire shifts in the relationships among species, whereas branch lengths change considerably from one set of characters to another and permit only to state about the evolution of the **data** set that generated the topology and the branch lengths (Brown et al. 2010 ).