Department of Ecology, Laboratory of Quantitative Ecology, Universidade Federaldo Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS 91540-000, Brazil.
Ecol Lett. 2010 May;13(5):587-96. doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01456.x. Epub 2010 Mar 24.
It is well known that species evolutionary history plays a crucial role in community assembly. Here, we offer a formal analytical framework to integrate in metacommunity analysis the species' phylogeny with their functional traits and abundances. We define phylogenetic structure of a community as phylogenetically weighted species composition. This is used to reveal patterns of phylogenetic community variation and to measure and test by specified null models the phylogenetic signal at the metacommunity level, which we distinguish from phylogenetic signal at the species pool level. The former indicates that communities more similar in their phylogenetic structure are also similar in their average trait values, which may indicate species' niche conservation for the given traits. We apply this framework to an example from grassland communities and find that traits with significant phylogenetic signal at the metacommunity level exhibit ecological filtering along the resource gradient, but since both mechanisms act independently on traits, niche conservatism is not supported.
众所周知，物种进化历史在群落组装中起着至关重要的作用。在这里，我们提供了一个正式的分析框架，将物种的系统发育与其功能特征和丰度整合到集合分析中。我们将群落的系统发育结构定义为具有系统发育权重的物种组成。这用于揭示系统发育群落变异的模式，并通过指定的零模型来度量和检验集合水平上的系统发育信号，我们将其与物种库水平上的系统发育信号区分开来。前者表明，在系统发育结构上更相似的群落，其平均特征值也相似，这可能表明物种在给定特征上的生态位保守性。我们将这一框架应用于草原群落的一个例子，发现集合水平上具有显著系统发育信号的特征沿资源梯度表现出生态过滤，但由于这两种机制独立作用于特征，因此不支持生态位保守性。
