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Measuring biodiversity to explain community assembly: a unified approach
1Mathematical Ecology Research Group, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, UK. pavoine@mnhn.fr
Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society
|December 16, 2010
Summary
Understanding community composition requires integrating species, trait, and phylogenetic diversity across spatial scales. This unified framework reveals historical and ecological processes shaping biodiversity and highlights future research directions.
Area of Science:
- Ecology
- Evolutionary Biology
- Biodiversity Science
Background:
- Community composition has historically been described by species diversity (number and abundance of species).
- Recent advances incorporate trait and phylogenetic diversity, but measures have developed independently, causing semantic confusion.
- Integrating these measures is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes.
Purpose of the Study:
- To demonstrate how species, trait, and phylogenetic diversity can be combined across spatial scales.
- To reveal the historical, deterministic, and stochastic processes impacting local community composition.
- To propose a unified semantic framework linking these diversity indices.
Main Methods:
- Development of mathematical measures incorporating trait dissimilarities and phylogenetic relatedness.
- Comparative analysis of species, trait, and phylogenetic diversity indices.
- Application across large to local spatial scales to link regional and local processes.
Main Results:
- A unified framework reveals the interplay of historical, deterministic, and stochastic processes in community assembly.
- Species, trait, and phylogenetic diversity indices provide complementary insights into community structure.
- Different diversity indices are applicable across various spatial scales, linking large-scale patterns to local dynamics.
Conclusions:
- Integrating species, trait, and phylogenetic diversity offers a powerful approach to understanding community assembly.
- This integrated approach can elucidate the roles of environmental filtering, speciation, dispersal, and drift.
- Future research should focus on spatial variation, global gradients, trait-phylogeny links, and human impacts on biodiversity.
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