Strong influence of regional species pools on continent-wide structuring of local communities

Abstract

There is a long tradition in ecology of evaluating the relative contribution of the regional species pool and local interactions on the structure of local communities. Similarly, a growing number of studies assess the phylogenetic structure of communities, relative to that in the regional species pool, to examine the interplay between broad-scale evolutionary and fine-scale ecological processes. Finally, a renewed interest in the influence of species source pools on communities has shown that the definition of the source pool influences interpretations of patterns of community structure. We use a continent-wide dataset of local ant communities and implement ecologically explicit source pool definitions to examine the relative importance of regional species pools and local interactions for shaping community structure. Then we assess which factors underlie systematic variation in the structure of communities along climatic gradients. We find that the average phylogenetic relatedness of species in ant communities decreases from tropical to temperate regions, but the strength of this relationship depends on the level of ecological realism in the definition of source pools. We conclude that the evolution of climatic niches influences the phylogenetic structure of regional source pools and that the influence of regional source pools on local community structure is strong.

Linking environmental filtering and disequilibrium to biogeography with a community climate framework

“…Mean pool richness was 2522 6 1042 species (mean 6 SD). While other species pool definitions are possible and useful (Lessard et al 2012a), we did not consider them for this study because our intent was primarily to demonstrate the framework in as simple a manner as possible.…”

Process-Based Species Pools Reveal the Hidden Signature of Biotic Interactions Amid the Influence of Temperature Filtering

“…This illustrates how the signature of environmental filtering might conceal that of competitive interactions. Later studies have extended this approach by comparing the outcome of several null models (Gotelli et al 2010), each derived from a different process-based species pool (Lessard et al 2012a(Lessard et al , 2012b. Here, we use a similar comparative approach as a heuristic tool to explore the potential influence of multiple processes on patterns of phylogenetic and trait assemblage structure.…”

“…However, the former definition introduces biases against rare species that are unlikely to be sampled, and the latter conflates geographic proximity with environmental similarity (Warren et al 2014). Here, we introduce an approach that remedies these issues and builds on recent analytical advances (Kembel 2009;Gotelli et al 2010;Lessard et al 2012b) by constructing species pools that are process based and probabilistic. Our heuristic null model approach defines an assemblagespecific species pool ( fig.…”

“…1B). As an example, previous studies have built environmentally filtered species pools to assess the influence of the environment on patterns of phylogenetic (Lessard et al 2012b;Eiserhardt et al 2013) and trait (Kraft et al 2008;Algar et al 2011) structure. By limiting the species pool to species that could tolerate the local environmental conditions, Kraft et al (2008) found that patterns of trait filtering became weaker while patterns of trait evenness became stronger.…”

Region effects influence local tree species diversity

“…However, if unique historical and biogeographic features of each region influenced within-region diversification and extinction (8)(9)(10), these regionspecific effects might contribute to the global pattern in local species richness. Efforts to disentangle these effects have met with limited success and have led to a long-standing discussion of the relationship between local and regional diversity (6,(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21).…”