Abstract
BackgroundEcologists have been monitoring community dynamics with the purpose of understanding the rates and causes of community change. However, there is a lack of monitoring of community dynamics from the perspective of phylogeny.Methods/Principle FindingsWe attempted to understand temporal phylogenetic turnover in a 50 ha tropical forest (Barro Colorado Island, BCI) and a 20 ha subtropical forest (Dinghushan in southern China, DHS). To obtain temporal phylogenetic turnover under random conditions, two null models were used. The first shuffled names of species that are widely used in community phylogenetic analyses. The second simulated demographic processes with careful consideration on the variation in dispersal ability among species and the variations in mortality both among species and among size classes. With the two models, we tested the relationships between temporal phylogenetic turnover and phylogenetic similarity at different spatial scales in the two forests. Results were more consistent with previous findings using the second null model suggesting that the second null model is more appropriate for our purposes. With the second null model, a significantly positive relationship was detected between phylogenetic turnover and phylogenetic similarity in BCI at a 10 m×10 m scale, potentially indicating phylogenetic density dependence. This relationship in DHS was significantly negative at three of five spatial scales. This could indicate abiotic filtering processes for community assembly. Using variation partitioning, we found phylogenetic similarity contributed to variation in temporal phylogenetic turnover in the DHS plot but not in BCI plot.Conclusions/SignificanceThe mechanisms for community assembly in BCI and DHS vary from phylogenetic perspective. Only the second null model detected this difference indicating the importance of choosing a proper null model.
Highlights
A central challenge in community ecology is to understand community dynamics [1,2]
In Barro Colorado Island (BCI), K values were all less than 0.1 for all of the tested eight functional traits [16], indicating that phylogenetic signal was little to null for the eight functional traits for tree species in the BCI plot
The results suggest that using phylogenetic distance as a surrogate for difference of functional traits is proper for species in DHS plot but not reliable for species in BCI plot
Summary
A central challenge in community ecology is to understand community dynamics [1,2]. Ecologists have been documenting community dynamics, such as species-specific mortality rates, recruitment rates, population growth rates and the change of species composition, in many forest communities providing basic knowledge for biodiversity maintenance [8,9,10]. Community dynamics can results from both deterministic niche-based mechanisms [11] and stochastic mechanisms which consider only dispersal and ecological drift [2]. As species names do not convey critical information regarding the ecological and evolutionary similarity of species [12,13,14,15], exploring changes in taxonomic composition of species alone cannot distinguish deterministic mechanisms from stochastic processes [16]. Ecologists have been monitoring community dynamics with the purpose of understanding the rates and causes of community change. There is a lack of monitoring of community dynamics from the perspective of phylogeny
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