Abstract
Community ecologists have become increasingly interested in analyzing the phylogenetic diversity of species assemblages. Species that co-occur in the same habitats often share a common phylogenetic history such that at coarse spatial scales a species assemblage with a locally clustered phylogenetic structure is usually associated with the presence of habitat filtering mechanisms. However, more recently it has been hypothesized that environmental filters act primarily on the relative abundance of species rather than on their simple presences and absences, reducing the species’ probabilities to persist in given environmental conditions. This process may produce a non-random distribution of species abundances in the regional phylogeny even in the absence of a locally clustered phylogenetic structure. In this paper, using data from the urban flora of Brussels (Belgium) we tested for the presence of non-randomness in the distribution of abundances among the species phylogenetic structure. We argue that the observed pattern of low species phylogenetic distinctiveness at increasing species abundances is compatible with environmental filtering processes.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
Abbreviations
- OLS:
-
Ordinary Least Squares
- SOF:
-
Species Occupancy Frequency
References
Buerki, S., F. Forest, N. Salamin and N. Alvarez. 2011. Comparative performance of supertree algorithms in large data sets using the soapberry family (Sapindaceae) as a case study. Syst. Biol. 60: 32–44.
Cade, B.S. and B.R. Noon. 2003. A gentle introduction to quantile regression for ecologists. Front. Ecol. Environ. 1: 412–420.
Cavender-Bares, J., K.H. Kozak, P.V.A. Fine and S.W. Kembel. 2009. The merging of community ecology and phylogenetic biology. Ecol. Lett. 12: 693–715.
de Bello, F., J. Doležal, C. Ricotta and J. Klimešová. 2011. Coexistence and turnover of plant clonal traits in East Ladakh. Preslia 83: 315–327.
Forest, F., R. Grenyer, M. Rouget, T.J. Davies, R.M. Cowling, D.P. Faith, A. Balmford, J.C. Manning, S. Proches, M. van der Bank, G. Reeves, T.A.J. Hedderson and V. Savolainen. 2007. Preserving the evolutionary potential of floras in biodiversity hotspots. Nature 445: 757–760.
Gaston, K.J. 1994. Rarity. Chapman and Hall, London.
Godefroid, S. 2001. Temporal analysis of the Brussels flora as indicator for changing environmental quality. Landscape Urban Plan. 52: 203–224.
Godefroid, S. and N. Koedam. 2007. Urban plant species patterns are highly driven by density and function of built-up areas. Landscape Ecol. 22: 1227–1239.
Godefroid, S., D. Monbaliu and N. Koedam. 2007. The role of soil and microclimate variables in the distribution patterns of urban wasteland flora. Landscape Urban Plan. 80: 45–55.
Grime, J.P. 1998. Benefits of plant diversity to ecosystems: immediate, filter and founder effects. J. Ecol. 86: 902–910.
Hardy, O.J. 2008. Testing the spatial phylogenetic structure of local communities: statistical performances of different null models and test statistics on a locally neutral community. J. Ecol. 96: 914–926.
IBGE, 1999. Atlas de la Flore de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale. Institut Bruxellois pour la Gestion de l’Environnement, Brussels.
Knapp, S., I. Kühn, O. Schweiger and S. Klotz. 2008. Challenging urban species diversity: contrasting phylogenetic patterns across plant functional groups in Germany. Ecol. Lett. 11: 1054–1064.
Koenker, R.W. 2009. Quantreg: quantile regression. R package, Version 4.79. URL: https://doi.org/cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ quantreg/.
Kraft, N.J.B. and D.D. Ackerly. 2010. Functional trait and phylogenetic tests of community assembly across spatial scales in an Amazonian forest. Ecol. Monogr. 80: 401–422.
Kress, W.J., D.L. Erickson, N.G. Swenson, J. Thompson, M. Uriarte. and J.K. Zimmerman. 2010. Advances in the use of DNA barcodes to build a community phylogeny for tropical trees in a Puerto Rican forest dynamics plot. PloS ONE 5: e15409.
Losos, J.B. 2008. Phylogenetic niche conservatism, phylogenetic signal and the relationship between phylogenetic relatedness and ecological similarity among species. Ecol. Lett. 11: 995–1007.
R Development Core Team. 2012. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL: https://doi.org/www.r-project.org/
Ricotta, C., S. Godefroid and L. Celesti-Grapow. 2008. Common species have lower taxonomic diversity: Evidence from the urban floras of Brussels and Rome. Diversity Distrib. 14: 530–537.
Ricotta, C., S. Godefroid and D. Rocchini. 2010. Invasiveness of alien plants in Brussels is related to their phylogenetic similarity to native species. Diversity Distrib. 16: 655–662.
Ricotta, C., F.A. La Sorte, P. Pyšek, G.L. Rapson, L. Celesti-Grapow and K. Thompson. 2009. Phyloecology of urban alien floras. J. Ecol. 97: 1243–1251.
Sukopp, H. 2004. Human-caused impact on preserved vegetation. Landscape Urban Plan. 68: 347–355.
Swenson, N.G. 2009. Phylogenetic resolution and quantifying the phylogenetic diversity and dispersion of communities. PLoS ONE 4: e4390.
Vamosi, S.M., S.B. Heard, J.C. Vamosi and C.O. Webb. 2009. Emerging patterns in the comparative analysis of phylogenetic community structure. Mol. Ecol. 18: 572–592.
Warwick, R.M. and K.R. Clarke. 2001. Practical measures of marine biodiversity based on relatedness of species. Oceanogr. Mar. Biol. Annu. Rev. 39: 207–231.
Webb, C.O. 2000. Exploring the phylogenetic structure of ecological communities: an example for rain forest trees. Am. Nat. 156: 145–155.
Webb, C.O. and M.J. Donoghue. 2005. Phylomatic: tree assembly for applied phylogenetics. Mol. Ecol. Notes 5: 181–183.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
About this article
Cite this article
Ricotta, C., Heathfield, D., Godefroid, S. et al. The effects of habitat filtering on the phylogenetic structure of the urban flora of Brussels (Belgium). COMMUNITY ECOLOGY 13, 97–101 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.13.2012.1.12
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.13.2012.1.12