Phylogenetic diversity metrics for ecological communities: integrating species richness, abundance and evolutionary history

Phylogenetic information is increasingly being used to understand the assembly of biological communities and ecological processes. However, commonly used metrics of phylogenetic diversity (PD) do not incorporate information on the relative abundances of individuals within a community. In this study,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ecology letters 2010-01, Vol.13 (1), p.96-105
Main Authors: Cadotte, Marc W, Jonathan Davies, T, Regetz, James, Kembel, Steven W, Cleland, Elsa, Oakley, Todd H
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abundance distribution
Animal and plant ecology
Animal, plant and microbial ecology
Biodiversity
Biological and medical sciences
Biological Evolution
California
Ecology
ecophylogenetic diversity
evenness
Evolutionary biology
evolutionary history
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
General aspects
Genetic Speciation
Integrated approach
Jasper Ridge biological preserve
Measurement techniques
Models, Biological
Models, Statistical
null models
Phylogeny
Poaceae - physiology
Population Dynamics
Shannon Index
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Summary:Phylogenetic information is increasingly being used to understand the assembly of biological communities and ecological processes. However, commonly used metrics of phylogenetic diversity (PD) do not incorporate information on the relative abundances of individuals within a community. In this study, we develop three indices of PD that explicitly consider species abundances. First, we present a metric of phylogenetic-abundance evenness that evaluates the relationship between the abundance and the distribution of terminal branch lengths. Second, we calculate an index of hierarchical imbalance of abundances at the clade level encapsulating the distribution of individuals across the nodes in the phylogeny. Third, we develop an index of abundance-weighted evolutionary distinctiveness and generate an entropic index of phylogenetic diversity that captures both information on evolutionary distances and phylogenetic tree topology, and also serves as a basis to evaluate species conservation value. These metrics offer measures of phylogenetic diversity incorporating different community attributes. We compare these new metrics to existing ones, and use them to explore diversity patterns in a typical California annual grassland plant community at the Jasper Ridge biological preserve. Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 96-105
ISSN:1461-023X
1461-0248
DOI:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01405.x