Incorporating Clade Identity in Analyses of Phylogenetic Community Structure: An Example with Hummingbirds

Abstract

An important challenge in community ecology is to determine how processes occurring at multiple spatial, temporal, and phylogenetic scales influence the structure of local communities. While indexes of phylogenetic structure, which measure how related species are in a community, provide insight into the processes that shape species coexistence, they fail to pinpoint the phylogenetic scales at which those processes occur. Here, we explore a framework to identify the species and clades responsible for the inferred patterns of phylogenetic structure within a given community. Further, we evaluate how communities that share the nonrandom representation of species from a given clade in the phylogeny are distributed across geography and environmental gradients. Using Ecuadorian hummingbird communities, we found that multiple patterns of phylogenetic structure often occur within a local assemblage. We also identified four geographic regions where species from certain clades exhibit nonrandom representation: the eastern Amazonian lowlands, the western dry lowlands, the Andes at middle elevations, and the Andes at high elevations. The environmental gradients along which changes in the local coexistence of species occurred were mainly elevation, annual precipitation, and seasonality in both temperature and precipitation. Finally, we show how these patterns can be used to generate hypotheses about the processes that allow species coexistence.