Departments of Botany, Forest & Conservation Sciences, Biodiversity Research Centre, University of British Columbia, 2212 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada.
African Centre for DNA Barcoding, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, 2092, South Africa.
Ecol Lett. 2021 May;24(5):1073-1088. doi: 10.1111/ele.13682. Epub 2021 Feb 10.
Species' evolutionary histories shape their present-day ecologies, but the integration of phylogenetic approaches in ecology has had a contentious history. The field of ecophylogenetics promised to reveal the process of community assembly from simple indices of phylogenetic pairwise distances - communities shaped by environmental filtering were composed of closely related species, whereas communities shaped by competition were composed of less closely related species. However, the mapping of ecology onto phylogeny proved to be not so straightforward, and the field remains mired in controversy. Nonetheless, ecophylogenetic methods provided important advances across ecology. For example the phylogenetic distances between species is a strong predictor of pest and pathogen sharing, and can thus inform models of species invasion, coexistence and the disease dilution/amplification effect of biodiversity. The phylogenetic structure of communities may also provide information on niche space occupancy, helping interpret patterns of facilitation, succession and ecosystem functioning - with relevance for conservation and restoration - and the dynamics among species within foodwebs and metacommunities. I suggest leveraging advances in our understanding of the process of evolution on phylogenetic trees would allow the field to progress further, while maintaining the essence of the original vision that proved so seductive.
物种的进化历史塑造了它们现今的生态，但将系统发育方法整合到生态学中的做法一直存在争议。生态系统发育生态学领域有望揭示群落组装的过程，只需简单地用系统发育对距离的指数来表示——由环境过滤形成的群落由亲缘关系密切的物种组成，而由竞争形成的群落则由亲缘关系不太密切的物种组成。然而，将生态学映射到系统发育树上并不那么简单，该领域仍然存在争议。尽管如此，生态系统发育方法还是在生态学领域取得了重要进展。例如，物种之间的系统发育距离是害虫和病原体共享的强有力预测因子，因此可以为物种入侵、共存以及生物多样性对疾病稀释/放大效应的模型提供信息。群落的系统发育结构也可能提供关于生态位空间占据的信息，有助于解释促进、演替和生态系统功能的模式——这与保护和恢复有关——以及食物网和元群落中物种之间的动态。我建议利用我们对系统发育树上进化过程的理解的进展，使该领域进一步发展，同时保持最初如此诱人的原始愿景的本质。
