Can functional traits account for phylogenetic signal in community composition?

Abstract Urban community gardens provide habitat for biodiversity within urban landscapes. Beneficial insects, those that provide important ecosystem services like pollination and pest control, are among the many inhabitants of these green spaces. Garden management and the composition of the urban matrix in which they are embedded can affect not only the abundance and species richness of beneficial insects but also their community composition and functional traits. During 2014 and 2015 (June to September), we collected ladybird beetles (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) in 19 community gardens in three counties of the California Central Coast. We examined the effects of garden- and landscape-level characteristics on ladybird community composition and functional traits. Out of the 19 species collected, only 3 were non-native to California (3 were not identified to species). Similarities in ladybird species composition were not driven by geographic distance between gardens, which suggest that beetles in these landscapes are not experiencing dispersal limitation. Instead, three landscape-level environmental variables and seven garden-scale ones correlated with changes in community composition. Even though we perceive cities as highly disturbed low-quality landscapes, our results suggest that highly mobile arthropods such as ladybird beetles, may not perceive the urban matrix as a barrier to movement and that urban gardens can be inhabited by native species with different sizes, diet breadths and diets. Nevertheless, our results also suggest garden specific management practices, such as altering ground cover, can affect the taxonomic and functional composition of ladybird beetles with potential implications to their ecosystem services.

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From a conceptual framework to an operational approach for managing grassland functional diversity to obtain targeted ecosystem services: Case studies from French mountains

Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems ◽

10.1017/s1742170513000306 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 29 (3) ◽

pp. 239-254 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

M. Duru ◽

C. Jouany ◽

X. Le Roux ◽

M.L. Navas ◽

P. Cruz

Keyword(s):

Ecosystem Services ◽

Conceptual Framework ◽

Community Composition ◽

Functional Traits ◽

Management Practices ◽

Abiotic Factors ◽

Microbial Community Composition ◽

Operational Approach ◽

Functional Perspective ◽

Functional Types

AbstractResearch to understand and manage ecosystems to supply services has recently spurred a functional view of their biodiversity. In particular, approaches based on functional traits rather than species diversity are increasingly used to reflect interactions between organisms and their environment. These approaches bring a functional perspective to the study of community structure responses to disturbances and resources, and of their effects on ecosystem functioning and services. From an academic perspective, we propose a conceptual framework based on species functional traits to better infer how grassland management practices (fertilization, defoliation regime) along with abiotic factors influence plant, animal and microbial community composition and a range of services in grassland ecosystems. The core of the framework relies on combinations of plant functional traits and associated microbial features that specifically respond to environmental and management factors and influence ecosystem services. To overcome stakeholders’ difficulty in applying the concept of functional traits, we propose an operational approach implying the mapping of plant communities distributed into five plant functional types (PFTs). The approach was used for fields in grassland-based livestock farms from two French grassland networks. We evaluated its ability to predict a range of services including forage provision and non-market services according to environmental and management drivers. PFT-based plant community composition predicted forage services reasonably well but responded weakly to environmental gradients. To cope with the observed limitations of current predictive approaches, we suggest including soil microbial functional types and adaptive management rather than using a prescriptive scheme.

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Can plant functional traits explain shifts in community composition in a changing Arctic?

Arctic Science ◽

10.1139/as-2020-0036 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Katlyn Rose Betway ◽

Robert D. Hollister ◽

Jeremy May ◽

Jacob A. Harris ◽

William Gould ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Community Composition ◽

Functional Traits ◽

Ecosystem Functioning ◽

Repeated Measures ◽

Vascular Plant ◽

Plant Cover ◽

The Arctic ◽

And Function ◽

Northern Alaska ◽

Over Time

The Arctic is warming more than twice the global average. Graminoids, deciduous shrubs, and evergreen shrubs have been shown to increase in cover in some regions, but not others. To better understand why plant response varies across regions, we compared change in cover over time with nine functional traits of twelve dominant species at three regions in northern Alaska (Utqiaġvik, Atqasuk, and Toolik Lake). Cover was measured three times from 2008 to 2018. Repeated measures ANOVA found one species showed a significant change in cover over time; Carex aquatilis increased at Atqasuk by 12.7%. Canonical correspondence analysis suggested a relationship between shifts in species cover and traits, but Pearson and Spearman correlations did not find a significant trend for any trait when analyzed individually. Investigation of community-weighted means (CWM) for each trait revealed no significant changes over time for any trait at any region. Whereas, estimated ecosystem values for several traits important to ecosystem functioning showed consistent increases over time at two regions (Utqiaġvik and Atqasuk). Results thus indicate that vascular plant community composition and function have remained consistent over time; however, documented increases in total plant cover have important implications for ecosystem functioning.

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Community phylogenetics require phylogenies reconstructed from plastid genomes

10.22541/au.161834751.14170237/v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Lu Jin ◽

Jia-Jia Liu ◽

Tian-Wen Xiao ◽

Qiao-Ming Li ◽

Luxiang Lin ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Functional Traits ◽

Phylogenetic Trees ◽

Phylogenetic Signal ◽

Maximum Height ◽

Type I ◽

Community Phylogenetics ◽

Phylogenetic Structure ◽

Plastid Genomes ◽

A Genome ◽

Genome Tree

Phylogenetic trees have been extensively used in community ecology. However, how the phylogenetic reconstruction affects ecological inferences is poorly understood. In this study, we reconstructed three different types of phylogenetic trees (a synthetic-tree generated using VPhylomaker, a barcode-tree generated using rbcL+matK+trnH-psbA and a genome-tree generated from plastid genomes) that represented an increasing level of phylogenetic resolution among 580 woody plant species from six dynamic plots in subtropical evergreen broadleaved forests of China. We then evaluated the performance of each phylogeny in estimations of community phylogenetic structure, turnover and phylogenetic signal in functional traits. As expected, the genome-tree was most resolved and most supported for relationships among species. For local phylogenetic structure, the three trees showed consistent results with Faith’s PD and MPD; however, only the synthetic-tree produced significant clustering patterns using MNTD for some plots. For phylogenetic turnover, contrasting results between the molecular trees and the synthetic-tree occurred only with nearest neighbor distance. The barcode-tree agreed more with the genome-tree than the synthetic-tree for both phylogenetic structure and turnover. For functional traits, both the barcode-tree and genome-tree detected phylogenetic signal in maximum height, but only the genome-tree detected signal in leaf width. This is the first study that uses plastid genomes in large-scale community phylogenetics. Our results highlight the outperformance of genome-trees over barcode-trees and synthetic-trees for the analyses studied here. Our results also point to the possibility of Type I and II errors in estimation of phylogenetic structure and turnover and detection of phylogenetic signal when using synthetic-trees.

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Can functional traits explain phylogenetic signal in the composition of a plant community?

10.1101/032938 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Daijiang Li ◽

Anthoy R Ives ◽

Donald M Waller

Keyword(s):

Functional Traits ◽

Community Assembly ◽

Phylogenetic Signal ◽

Species Traits ◽

Functional Trait ◽

Phylogenetic Information ◽

Ecological Processes ◽

Forest Sites ◽

Species Abundances ◽

Understory Plant

Phylogeny-based and functional trait-based analyses are two principle ways to study community assembly and underlying ecological processes. In principle, knowing all information about species traits would make phylogenetic information redundant, at least that component of phylogenetic signal in the distribution of species among communities that is caused by phylogenetically related species sharing similar traits. In reality, phylogenies may contain more information than a set of singular, discretely measured traits because we cannot measure all species traits and may misjudge which are most important. The extent to which functional trait information makes phylogenetic information redundant, however, has not been explicitly studied with empirical data in community ecology. Here, we use phylogenetic linear mixed models to analyze community assembly of 55 understory plant species in 30 forest sites in central Wisconsin. These communities show strong phylogenetic attraction, yet variation among sites in 20 environmental variables could not account for this pattern. Most of the 15 functional traits we measured had strong phylogenetic signal, but only three varied strongly among sites in ways that affected species' abundances. These three traits explained only 19% of variation in phylogenetic patterns of species co-occurrence. Thus, phylogenies appear to provide considerably more information about community assembly than the functional traits measured in this study, demonstrating the value of phylogeny in studying of community assembly processes even with abundant functional traits.

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Soil fungal community composition and functional similarity shift across distinct climatic conditions

FEMS Microbiology Ecology ◽

10.1093/femsec/fiaa193 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 96 (12) ◽

Author(s):

An Bui ◽

Devyn Orr ◽

Michelle Lepori-Bui ◽

Kelli Konicek ◽

Hillary S Young ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Community Composition ◽

Functional Traits ◽

Ecosystem Function ◽

Fungal Community ◽

Fungal Communities ◽

Fungal Community Composition ◽

Host Association ◽

Soil Fungal Community ◽

Soil Fungal Community Composition

ABSTRACT A large part of ecosystem function in woodland systems depends on soil fungal communities. However, global climate change has the potential to fundamentally alter these communities as fungal species are filtered with changing environmental conditions. In this study, we examined the potential effects of climate on host-associated (i.e. tree-associated) soil fungal communities at climatically distinct sites in the Tehachapi Mountains in California, where more arid conditions represent likely regional climate futures. We found that soil fungal community composition changes strongly across sites, with species richness and diversity being highest at the most arid site. However, host association may buffer the effects of climate on community composition, as host-associated fungal communities are more similar to each other across climatically distinct sites than the whole fungal community. Lastly, an examination of functional traits for ectomycorrhizal fungi, a well-studied guild of fungal mutualist species, showed that stress-tolerant traits were more abundant at arid sites than mesic sites, providing a mechanistic understanding of these community patterns. Taken together, our results indicate that fungal community composition will likely shift with future climate change but that host association may buffer these effects, with shifts in functional traits having implications for future ecosystem function.

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