Is phylogenetic and functional trait diversity a driver or a consequence of grassland community assembly?

Abstract

Community assembly changes fundamentally in response to disturbance following habitat destruction due to extreme events and human activities. There are several important aspects of community assembly that can be measured in response to disturbance or during species establishment. Of these measurable outcomes, metrics of taxonomic or species diversity (SD) are perhaps the most common and logistically the easiest to evaluate. It is increasingly evident that measurements of phylogenetic (PD) and functional trait (FD) diversity can provide more information than traditional measures of diversity and desirable and informative metrics to measure restoration outcomes. However, it is unclear whether FD and PD are drivers or a consequence of community assembly. This Special Feature highlights eight field studies and a review that have investigated how PD diversity and functional trait diversity can be used to better understand grassland community assembly following disturbance or during restoration, and how as potential drivers they can be manipulated experimentally or incorporated into evolutionary models. Topics include: colonizing species as a function of FD and PD; dominant species origin impacts on subordinate species FD; impacts of environmental gradients such as seed mix richness, first‐year precipitation and restoration age on FD and taxonomic diversity; impacts of drought and resource availability; and a synthesis of studies that measured FD and PD to determine if they provide similar or incongruent inferences for ecological and functional processes. The work in this Special Feature indicates that SD, FD and PD can act as drivers and passengers of community assembly, and often yield different insights. Environmental gradients such as soil nutrients, precipitation and environmental drivers like drought can influence FD and PD of assembling communities in predicted and unexpected ways. Synthesis. Results from the studies in this Special Feature highlight the importance of considering a multitude of ecological and evolutionary drivers of community assembly in grassland ecosystems. Studies pushing this field forward will be those that incorporate or study higher trophic levels, realistically incorporate climate change and disentangle the impacts of FD and PD.

Do No Harm: Efficacy of a Single Herbicide Application to Control an Invasive Shrub While Minimizing Collateral Damage to Native Species

“…Inclusion of phylogenetic diversity in the response metrics in this study showed that aspects of community response to invasive species can control and drive ecosystem function in restorations [17,30]. Phylogenetic diversity can be a consequence of community assembly mechanisms in grassland restorations [31] and is not always congruent with patterns of taxonomic diversity [32]. Such insights from patterns of phylogenetic diversity into mechanisms can be relevant for assessing the impacts of invasive species [33].…”

Global patterns and determinants of lake macrophyte taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic beta diversity

“…To address these limitations, Graham and Fine (2008) first proposed phylogenetic beta diversity (PβD) as a measure of the evolutionary dissimilarity between communities, providing a more comprehensive framework to explain the role of historical imprints on community membership and how evolutionary legacy underlies patterns of niche divergence (Mouquet et al, 2012). Meanwhile, functional beta diversity (FβD), reflecting the morphological, ecological and physiological similarities between communities (Loiseau et al, 2017), was shown to better explain ecosystem functioning and species niche relationships than other classical measures of species diversity (García-Girón et al, 2019a;Jones et al, 2019). Recently, there have been several calls (e.g.…”

“…It is now becoming clear that a simultaneous analysis of several diversity facets should provide the most basic building blocks to embrace the multifaceted nature of biodiversity and, at the same time, reveal aspects of community assembly beyond inferences that can be drawn from more traditional species-centred approaches (Jones et al, 2019). This reasoning is especially true from a conservation perspective.…”

Disturbance effects on productivity–plant diversity relationships from a 22‐year‐old successional field

“…Such responses to anthropogenic nutrient enrichment have received relatively little attention (Yang et al, 2018;Yang et al, 2019). Phylogenetic diversity changes reflect the impacts of human disturbance activities on phylogenetic community structure and provide a mechanistic understanding of species coexistence within communities (Webb et al, 2002;Cavender-Bares et al, 2009;Jones et al, 2019). In general, two hypotheses are proposed to explain species loss under nutrient enrichment, i.e., the abundance-based and functional trait-based hypotheses (Suding et al, 2005;Yang et al, 2015).…”