Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2012 Jan 22;279(1727):266-74. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2011.0552. Epub 2011 Jun 15.
There is a long tradition in ecology of evaluating the relative contribution of the regional species pool and local interactions on the structure of local communities. Similarly, a growing number of studies assess the phylogenetic structure of communities, relative to that in the regional species pool, to examine the interplay between broad-scale evolutionary and fine-scale ecological processes. Finally, a renewed interest in the influence of species source pools on communities has shown that the definition of the source pool influences interpretations of patterns of community structure. We use a continent-wide dataset of local ant communities and implement ecologically explicit source pool definitions to examine the relative importance of regional species pools and local interactions for shaping community structure. Then we assess which factors underlie systematic variation in the structure of communities along climatic gradients. We find that the average phylogenetic relatedness of species in ant communities decreases from tropical to temperate regions, but the strength of this relationship depends on the level of ecological realism in the definition of source pools. We conclude that the evolution of climatic niches influences the phylogenetic structure of regional source pools and that the influence of regional source pools on local community structure is strong.
生态学中长期以来一直致力于评估区域物种库和局部相互作用对当地群落结构的相对贡献。同样，越来越多的研究评估社区的系统发育结构，相对于区域物种库，以检验大尺度进化和小尺度生态过程之间的相互作用。最后，人们重新关注物种源库对群落的影响，表明源库的定义影响对群落结构模式的解释。我们使用一个遍及整个大陆的本地蚂蚁群落数据集，并实施生态上明确的源库定义，以研究区域物种库和局部相互作用对塑造群落结构的相对重要性。然后，我们评估哪些因素是沿气候梯度群落结构系统变异的基础。我们发现，蚂蚁群落中物种的平均系统发育相关性从热带地区到温带地区逐渐降低，但这种关系的强度取决于源库定义的生态现实水平。我们得出结论，气候生态位的进化影响区域源库的系统发育结构，而区域源库对本地群落结构的影响是强大的。
