Abstract
Range size variation in closely related species suggests different responses to biotic and abiotic heterogeneity across large geographic regions. Species turnover generates a wide spectrum of species assemblages, resulting in different competition intensities among taxa, creating restrictions as important as environmental constraints. We chose to adopt the widely used phylogenetic relatedness (NRI) measurement to define a metric that depicts competition strength (via phylogenetic similarity), which one focal species confronts in its environment. This new approach (NRIfocal) measures the potential of the community structure effect over performance of a single species. We chose two ecologically similar Peucaea sparrows, which co-occur and have highly dissimilar range size to test whether the population response to competition intensity is different between species. We analyzed the correlation between both Peucaea species population sizes and NRIfocal using data from point counts. Results indicated that the widespread species population size was not associated with NRIfocal, whereas the population of restricted-sized species exhibited a negative relationship with competition intensity. Consequently, a species' sensitivity to competition might be a limiting factor to range expansion, which provides new insights into geographic range analysis and community ecology.
Highlights
Biologic interactions are fundamental to the understanding of ecological patterns and processes. Webb et al (2002) set the framework of phylogenetic community ecology to elucidate the effect of ecological interactions depicted via phylogenetic structure, that is, the degree of relatedness among species forming an assemblage
This approach is strongly supported by the tested observation of the inheritance of niche-related traits from ancestors, termed niche conservatism (Wiens et al 2010; for birds see Lovette and Hochachka 2006), which reinforces the concept of a link between phylogenetic distance and ecological similarity reflected in behavioral (Houle 1997) and life-history traits (Burns and Strauss 2011)
Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Summary
Biologic interactions are fundamental to the understanding of ecological patterns and processes. Webb et al (2002) set the framework of phylogenetic community ecology to elucidate the effect of ecological interactions depicted via phylogenetic structure, that is, the degree of relatedness among species forming an assemblage. The present study included two components: (1) we modified a widely used metric of phylogenetic structure (NRI; Webb et al 2002) to center the attention toward a focal species and (2) two sympatric species in the genus Peucaea (Emberizidae), which exhibit very dissimilar range sizes, were used to evaluate whether a population size response to potential competition (through the modified metric) differs between the two sparrow species.
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