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Updated: Mar 15, 2026

JenaTron - An Experimental Approach to Study the Effects of Plant History and Soil History on Grassland Ecosystem Functioning
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The Evolutionary Legacy of Diversification Predicts Ecosystem Function.

Benjamin Yguel, Hervé Jactel, Ian S Pearse

    The American Naturalist
    |September 14, 2016
    PubMed
    Summary

    We introduce ELDERness, a new metric to analyze evolutionary branching patterns in species communities. This metric better predicts ecosystem functioning, like grassland productivity, than existing methods.

    Keywords:
    community ecologyevolutionary historylineage-through-time plotsphylogenetic diversityproductivityspecies coexistence

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    Area of Science:

    • Ecology
    • Evolutionary Biology
    • Biodiversity Science

    Background:

    • Evolutionary history structure influences community functioning.
    • Existing phylogenetic diversity metrics struggle to capture evolutionary branching patterns.
    • Understanding macroevolutionary history is key to predicting ecosystem function.

    Purpose of the Study:

    • Introduce a novel metric, ELDERness (Evolutionary Legacy of DivERsity), to quantify evolutionary branching patterns.
    • Assess ELDERness's ability to describe community branching and predict ecosystem functioning.
    • Compare ELDERness with existing phylogenetic diversity metrics.

    Main Methods:

    • Fitting polynomial functions to lineage-through-time (LTT) plots.
    • Utilizing third-order polynomial parameters to define "ELDERness surfaces."
    • Applying the metric to real and simulated community data, including grassland productivity.

    Main Results:

    • ELDERness accurately describes community branching patterns.
    • ELDERness surfaces effectively predict grassland community productivity.
    • Small ELDERness surfaces correlated with higher productivity, suggesting lineage complementarity and niche filling.

    Conclusions:

    • ELDERness offers a more nuanced approach to assessing macroevolutionary history in communities.
    • The metric enhances our ability to test hypotheses linking evolutionary patterns to ecosystem functioning.
    • ELDERness provides valuable insights beyond species richness and phylogenetic diversity.