Ricotta Carlo, Bacaro Giovanni, Caccianiga Marco, Cerabolini Bruno E L, Pavoine Sandrine
Department of Environmental Biology, University of Rome 'La Sapienza', Piazzale A. Moro 5, 00185, Rome, Italy.
Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, Via L. Giorgieri 10, 34127, Trieste, Italy.
Oecologia. 2018 Feb;186(2):339-346. doi: 10.1007/s00442-017-4026-x. Epub 2017 Dec 5.
The increasing use of phylogenetic methods in community ecology recognizes that accumulated evolutionary differences among species mirror, to some extent, ecological processes. The scope of this work is thus to propose a new method for the measurement of community-level phylogenetic redundancy, which takes into account the branching pattern of the underlying phylogeny. Like for functional redundancy, a measure of phylogenetic redundancy can be described as a normalized measure in the range (0-1) that relates the observed community-level phylogenetic diversity to the value of a hypothetical assemblage with the same abundance distribution of the focal community in which all species had independent evolution. Therefore, phylogenetic redundancy can be interpreted as the diversity decrease that is obtained by taking into account the evolutionary relationships among species in the calculation of diversity. The behavior of the proposed method, for which we provide a simple R function called 'phyloredundancy', was evaluated with published data on Alpine plant communities along a primary succession on a glacier foreland in northern Italy. As shown by our results, the method accounts for the length of shared branches in the phylogeny, producing a coherent framework for describing the evolutionary relationships within a species assemblage. Being based on classical diversity measures, which have been used in ecology for decades, it also has a great potential for future research in phylogenetic community ecology.
系统发育方法在群落生态学中的应用日益增加，这表明物种间积累的进化差异在一定程度上反映了生态过程。因此，这项工作的范围是提出一种测量群落水平系统发育冗余的新方法，该方法考虑了基础系统发育的分支模式。与功能冗余类似，系统发育冗余的度量可以描述为一个范围在(0 - 1)的归一化度量，它将观察到的群落水平系统发育多样性与一个假设组合的值相关联，该假设组合具有与目标群落相同的丰度分布，且其中所有物种都具有独立进化。因此，系统发育冗余可以解释为在多样性计算中考虑物种间进化关系所导致的多样性降低。我们提供了一个名为“phyloredundancy”的简单R函数来实现所提出的方法，利用意大利北部冰川前沿初级演替过程中高山植物群落的已发表数据对该方法的行为进行了评估。我们的结果表明，该方法考虑了系统发育中共享分支的长度，为描述物种组合内的进化关系提供了一个连贯的框架。由于该方法基于几十年来在生态学中使用的经典多样性度量，它在系统发育群落生态学的未来研究中也具有很大的潜力。
