Abstract
Recent advances in the field of plant community phylogenetics and invasion phylogenetics are mostly based on plot-level data, which do not take into consideration the spatial arrangement of individual plants within the plot. Here we use within-plot plant coordinates to investigate the link between the physical distance separating plants, and their phylogenetic relatedness. We look at two vegetation types (forest and grassland, similar in species richness and in the proportion of alien invasive plants) in subtropical coastal KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The relationship between phylogenetic distance and physical distance is weak in grassland (characterised by higher plant densities and low phylogenetic diversity), and varies substantially in forest vegetation (variable plant density, higher phylogenetic diversity). There is no significant relationship between the proportion of alien plants in the plots and the strength of the physical-phylogenetic distance relationship, suggesting that alien plants are well integrated in the local spatial-phylogenetic landscape.
Highlights
There has been a great deal of interest in plant community phylogenetics [1], and especially in its main invasion biology projection, Darwin’s naturalization hypothesis
While phylogenetics adds to Darwin’s original idea by converting relatedness from a categorical variable into a continuous one, to our knowledge, no attempt has been made to convert co-occurrence into a continuous variable, the physical distance between plants seems to be an obvious choice
We performed a Mantel tests for each plot, calculating Pearson’s correlation coefficient with 999 permutations [28,29]. We explored how these coefficients varied between grassland and forest vegetation, and in relation to the number of species, phylogenetic diversity, plant density, and log-transformed percentage alien plants
Summary
There has been a great deal of interest in plant community phylogenetics [1], and especially in its main invasion biology projection, Darwin’s naturalization hypothesis. This hypothesis states that plants that have close indigenous relatives in a region are less likely to become naturalized, compared to those that do not [2,3,4,5,6]. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0123238 April 20, 2015
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