Life history traits, but not phylogeny, drive compositional patterns in a butterfly metacommunity

Abstract

Community assembly is a combination of ecological, evolutionary, and stochastic processes. Separating out the abiotic and biotic processes (such as limiting similarity or environmental filtering) from stochastic processes is central to developing a cogent approach for understanding patterns in ecological community structure and organization. Using butterfly communities in a fragmented landscape, we tested the hypothesis that local environmental filtering drives character convergences in traits of species belonging to different clades. We found that, while many traits were determined both by phylogeny and environment, trait convergence within the phylogeny was extensive and eroded the phylogenetic structure associated with habitat use. Traits associated with habitat use are shown to be only moderately phylogenetically conserved in chalk grassland butterfly assemblages, and further analysis revealed that traits associated with environmental filtering may be highly labile rather than phylogenetically conserved. In general, a significant phylogenetic signal is therefore neither sufficient to demonstrate a lack of trait convergence, nor to determine whether communities are likely to be phylogenetically structured. We conclude that explicit trait-based approaches should be used in preference to the more indirect approach based on phylogenetic conservatism for understanding metacommunity assembly processes.

Combining functional traits and phylogeny to disentangling Amazonian butterfly assemblages on anthropogenic gradients

“…Habitat size itself is not determinant for the distribution of certain groups, neither on the formation of phylogenetic patterns, a trend already observed in plant communities on the northern limit of tropical rain forest for the Neotropical region, in Mexico (Arroyo-Rodr ıguez et al 2012). The main conclusion from this is that phylogeny may not the most important driver for functional composition and evolutionary responses to fragmentation, a tendency also observed for butterfly assemblages in fragmented grasslands in southern Belgium (Pavoine et al 2014). Especially, those traits were related to habitat perception and individual dispersion between habitat patches (Thomas 2000, Turlure et al 2016, as manifested in the surrounding matrix during the successional process, driving a resilience process.…”

“…The evaluation of phylogenetic signal strength in butterfly traits (mainly those related to flight characteristics and habitat use) has been recently incorporated to disentangle butterfly assemblies along environmental gradients (Pavoine et al 2014), including studies in the Amazon rainforest (Grac ßa et al 2017b). Nevertheless, this is the first study that also combines phylogeny with butterfly species distribution along forest gradients, controlling for its effects on functional composition.…”

Dispersal traits drive the phylogenetic distance decay of similarity in Neotropical stream metacommunities

“…An unstable habitat patch that satisfies the individual's requirements in short intervals will therefore be sufficient for a multivoltine species to complete its life cycle but is unlikely to be sufficient for a univoltine species. This reasoning is consistent with recent findings showing that European butterflies in disturbed fragments are those with fast life cycles, high mobility and high reproductive rates (Pavoine et al ., ). These authors argued that species with such characteristics are the only ones able to complete their life cycles before new disturbances occur in the environment.…”

Ecological determinants of butterfly vulnerability across the European continent

“…Therefore, we chose to adhere to the results without phylogenetic correction in order to cover the full set of documented species. Other studies also indicate that it is not always necessary to apply phylogenetic corrections in trait analyses (Mattila et al 2006(Mattila et al , 2011Päivinen et al 2005;Pavoine et al 2014;Bartonova et al 2014;Leingärtner et al 2014;De Bello et al 2015). This appears especially true for both this and the abovementioned studies that (partly) involve ecologically based traits, such as our climatic niche traits, which are less likely to be evolutionary conserved than morphological traits, such as body size.…”