Abstract
Summary Morphological diversity (disparity) is an essential but often neglected aspect of biodiversity. Hence, it seems timely and promising to re‐emphasize morphology in modern evolutionary studies. Disparity is a good proxy for the diversity of functions and interactions with the environment of a group of taxa. In addition, geographical and ecological patterns of disparity are crucial to understand organismal evolution and to guide biodiversity conservation efforts.Here, we analyse floral disparity across latitudinal intervals, growth forms, climate types, types of habitats, and regions for a large and representative sample of the angiosperm order Ericales.We find a latitudinal gradient of floral disparity and a decoupling of disparity from species richness. Other factors investigated are intercorrelated, and we find the highest disparity for tropical trees growing in African and South American forests.Explanations for the latitudinal gradient of floral disparity may involve the release of abiotic constraints and the increase of biotic interactions towards tropical latitudes, allowing tropical lineages to explore a broader area of the floral morphospace. Our study confirms the relevance of biodiversity parameters other than species richness and is consistent with the importance of species interactions in the tropics, in particular with respect to angiosperm flowers and their pollinators.
Highlights
Life on Earth is distributed unevenly due to varied geological and climatic conditions over time and space
To get around potential correlations among factors, we compared the disparity of growth forms within each category of the other factors
In the order Ericales, floral disparity is significantly higher in the tropics than in other climate zones
Summary
Life on Earth is distributed unevenly due to varied geological and climatic conditions over time and space. In addition to these abiotic conditions, dynamics of speciation, extinction, migration and biotic interactions likely play important roles in shaping species richness and species composition in different regions and communities (Gaston, 2000; Jablonski et al, 2017; Schluter & Pennell, 2017). In addition to species number, biodiversity includes aspects such as phylogenetic diversity, morphological diversity, dominance and rarity of species as well as the diversity of their ecosystem functions (Hillebrand et al, 2018; Stevens & Tello, 2018). The interpretation of disparity patterns strongly depends on the phylogenetic and geographic scale investigated, and, importantly, on the biological functions of the traits disparity estimates are based on
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