Abstract
The influence of ecological traits to the distribution and abundance of species is a prevalent issue in biodiversity science. Most studies of plant community assembly have focused on traits related to abiotic aspects or direct interactions among plants, with less attention paid to ignore indirect interactions, as those mediated by pollinators. Here, we assessed the influence of phylogeny, habitat, and floral morphology on ecological community structure in a clade of Neotropical lianas (tribe Bignonieae, Bignoniaceae). Our investigation was guided by the long-standing hypothesis that habitat specialization has promoted speciation in Bignonieae, while competition for shared pollinators influences species co-occurrence within communities. We analyzed a geo-referenced database for 94 local communities occurring across the Neotropics. The effect of floral morphological traits and abiotic variables on species co-occurrence was investigated, taking into account phylogenetic relationships. Habitat filtering seems to be the main process driving community assembly in Bignonieae, with environmental conditions limiting species distributions. Differing specialization to abiotic conditions might have evolved recently, in contrast to the general pattern of phylogenetic clustering found in communities of other diverse regions. We find no evidence that competition for pollinators affects species co-occurrence; instead, pollinator occurrence seems to have acted as an “environmental filter” in some habitats.
Highlights
The importance of species traits for the assembly of communities at local and regional scales is a pervasive topic in ecology [1,2]
Much attention has been paid to two distinct kinds of processes: environmental filtering, i.e., limits imposed by abiotic conditions, and competition, i.e., biotic interactions arising from common use of limited resources [3,4,5]
There was no phylogenetic structure in the communities analyzed, with only a few values of net relatedness index (NRI) and nearest taxon index (NTI) being statistically significant (Table S1)
Summary
The importance of species traits for the assembly of communities at local and regional scales is a pervasive topic in ecology [1,2]. While environmental filtering tends to favor co-occurrence of species with similar phenotypes [6,7,8], competition is thought to create phenotypic ‘‘evenness’’ (overdispersion) of species within communities [5,8,9] These processes are expected to exert opposing effects on the phenotypic structure of communities. The dynamics of trait and lineage evolution are relevant to community ecology [5,7,10,11], because depending on whether traits are phylogenetically conserved or not, communities can exhibit significant phylogenetic structure [5,9,12,13] As these assembly processes are not mutually exclusive, the phenotypic and phylogenetic structure of natural communities is expected to reflect their combined effects [10,13,14]
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