Phylogenetic balance and ecological evenness

The frequency distribution of numbers of species in taxonomic groups, where many species belong to a few very diverse higher taxa, is mirrored by that of species in most communities, where many individuals belong to a few very abundant species. Various hypotheses mechanistically link a species' community abundance with the diversity of the higher level taxon (genus, family, order) to which it belongs, but empirical data are equivocal about general trends in the relation between rank-taxon diversity and mean abundance. One reason for this inconclusive result may be the effect of the semisubjective nature of rank-based classification. We assessed the relationship between clade diversity and mean species abundance for two diverse tropical tree communities, using both traditional rank-based analysis and two new phylogenetic analyses (based on the ratio of individuals to taxa at each node in the phylogeny). Both rank-based and phylogenetic analyses using taxonomic ranks above the species level as terminal taxa detected a trend associating common species with species-rich families. In contrast, phylogenetic analyses using species as terminal taxa could not distinguish the observed distribution of species abundances from a random distribution with respect to clade diversity. The difference between these results might be due to (1) the absence of a real phylogeny-wide relationship between clade abundance and diversity, (2) the influence of poor phylogenetic resolution within families in our phylogenies, or (3) insufficient sensitivity of our metrics to subtle tree-wide effects. Further development and application of phylogeny-based methods for testing abundance-diversity relationships is needed.