Phylogenetic relatedness as a tool in restoration ecology: a meta-analysis

Abstract

Biotic interactions assembling plant communities can be positive (facilitation) or negative (competition) and operate simultaneously. Facilitative interactions and posterior competition are among the mechanisms triggering succession, thus representing a good scenario for ecological restoration. As distantly related species tend to have different phenotypes, and therefore different ecological requirements, they can coexist, maximizing facilitation and minimizing competition. We suggest including phylogenetic relatedness together with phenotypic information as a predictor for the net effects of the balance between facilitation and competition in nurse-based restoration experiments. We quantify, by means of a Bayesian meta-analysis of nurse-based restoration experiments performed worldwide, the importance of phylogenetic relatedness and life-form disparity in the survival, growth and density of facilitated plants. We find that the more similar the life forms of neighbouring plants are the greater the positive effect of phylogenetic distance is on survival and density. This result suggests that other characteristics beyond life form are also contained in the phylogeny, and the larger the phylogenetic distance, the less is the niche overlap, and therefore the less is the competition. As a general rule, we can maximize the success of the nurse-based practices by increasing life-form disparity and phylogenetic distances between the neighbour and the facilitated plant.

Phylogenetic Relatedness Influences Plant Interspecific Interactions Across Stress Levels in Coastal Ecosystems: a Meta-Analysis

“…On the other hand, another metaanalysis that related interspecific competition to phylogenetic and phenotypic characteristics found that increasing phylogenetic distance and life form disparity between nurse (i.e., neighbor) and target plants could promote successful nursebased restoration (Verdu et al 2012). Furthermore, Violle et al (2011) provided strong empirical evidence supporting the PLSH, by showing that interspecific interactions are more confidently predicted through phylogenetic relatedness than functional traits.…”

“…The bladj algorithm was used to date the nodes of the phylogenetic tree based on the ages from the Wikstrom et al database (Wikstrom et al 2001) using the Phylocom software (Webb et al 2008) (Supplementary material S1). For non-vascular plants, we estimated phylogenetic distance between target and neighbor species using the online TimeTree application (Hedges et al 2006;Verdu et al 2012). We also calculated the delta stress effect score, which is the difference between the effect size of low and high stress levels on growth or survival (i.e., the effect size under high stress − the effect size under low stress), and the stress variance score, which was the sum of the variances of growth or survival measurements at high and low stress (Borenstein et al 2009;He et al 2013).…”

“…The effect sizes were set as dependent variables, stress as a fixed variable, and identities of neighbor and target species as random variables. The variances around these effect sizes were passed to the mev argument of the MCMCglmm package in R (Hadfield and Nakagawa 2010;Verdu et al 2012). Priors were set as V = 1 and nu = 0.002, and we ran 13,000 MCMC iterations for each model.…”

“…The 95 % credible interval of the posterior distribution of the neighbor and target species identities which is the proportion of remaining variance of the model explained by neighbor and target species identities also was reported (Verdu et al 2012).…”

Species richness and phylogenetic structure in plant communities: 20 years of succession

“…Based on several assumptions, the phylodiversity of species assemblages also provides insights into processes of community assembly (Graham et al, 2009;Verdú et al, 2012;Meiners et al, 2015). Assuming that phylogenetic relatedness is a proxy for ecological relatedness (but see Gerhold et al, 2015;Lososová et al, 2016), the comparison of the phylodiversity of real assemblages with randomly constructed assemblages allows the relative importance of ecological processes to be inferred.…”