Scale dependence in the phylogenetic relatedness of alien and native taxa

达尔文的归化假说提出,由于生态位的不同,成功建群的外来物种与本地物种的关系不太密切。先前的研究对这一假设有支持也有反对,其中一个原因是外来物种和本地物种在大的空间尺度上有系统发育聚类的倾向,而在细微尺度上存在过度分散的倾向。然而,对于外来物种的系统发育关系如何改变其入侵群落的系统发育结构,以及在何种空间尺度上可能表现出这种影响,人们知之甚少。在本研究中,我们调查被入侵的森林下层植物群落在系统发育上是聚集的还是或过度分散的,亲缘关系如何随空间尺度变化,以及外来物种如何影响下层群落的系统发育模式。在澳大利亚东南部干旱森林的下层群落进行了5个空间尺度(1, 20, 500, 1500和4500 m²)的实地调查。使用两个指标的标准化效应量[(i)平均成对距离和(ii)平均最近分类单元距离]来量化群落与其外来和本地亚群落之间的系统发育关系,并研究系统发育模 式如何随空间尺度变化。研究结果表明,外来物种之间的亲缘关系非常密切,而且这种亲缘关系会随着尺度的增加而增加。在中等空间尺 度下(20–500 m²), 整个群落呈随机分布趋势,而本地物种高度分散,外来亚群落高度聚集。这说明亲缘关系密切的外来物种入侵使群落系统发育结构由过度分散向随机分布转变。外来物种和本地物种在空间尺度上是远亲,这支持了达尔文的归化假说,但只是在系统发育距离被量化为平均最近分类单元距离时成立。外来物种和本地物种的系统发育差异随着空间尺度的增加而增加,这与预期的模式相反。我们的研究结果表明,外来物种强大的系统发育聚类是由人类干预的引入驱动的,牵涉能够成功建群和传播的密切相关的类群。系统发育相关性的尺度依赖模式可能是由火灾和散布等随机过程引起的,这表明竞争和生境过滤并不是分别在小和大尺度上控制系统发育关系的唯一因素。区分不同进化深度的指标很重要,因为不同的指标可以显示不同的尺度依赖模式。     

A phylogenetic analysis of the British flora sheds light on the evolutionary and ecological factors driving plant invasions

Darwin's naturalization hypothesis predicts that invasive species should perform better in their novel range in the absence of close relatives in the native flora due to reduced competition. Evidence from recent taxonomic and phylogenetic‐based studies, however, is equivocal. We test Darwin's naturalization hypothesis at two different spatial scales using a fossil‐dated molecular phylogenetic tree of the British native and alien flora (ca. 1600 species) and extensive, fine‐scale survey data from the 1998 Countryside Survey. At both landscape and local scales, invasive species were neither significantly more nor less related to the native flora than their non‐invasive alien counterparts. Species invasiveness was instead correlated with higher nitrogen and moisture preference, but not other life history traits such as life‐form and height. We argue that invasive species spread in Britain is hence more likely determined by changes in land use and other anthropogenic factors, rather than evolutionary history. Synthesis. The transition from non‐invasive to invasive is not related to phylogenetic distinctiveness to the native community, but instead to their environmental preferences. Therefore, combating biological invasions in the Britain and other industrialized countries need entirely different strategies than in more natural environments.     

Genome phylogeny based on short-range correlations in DNA sequences.

The surprising fact that global statistical properties computed on a genomewide scale may reveal species information has first been observed in studies of dinucleotide frequencies. Here we will look at the same phenomenon with a totally different statistical approach. We show that patterns in the short-range statistical correlations in DNA sequences serve as evolutionary fingerprints of eukaryotes. All chromosomes of a species display the same characteristic pattern, markedly different from those of other species. The chromosomes of a species are sorted onto the same branch of a phylogenetic tree due to this correlation pattern. The average correlation between nucleotides at a distance k is quantified in two independent ways: (i) by estimating it from a higher-order Markov process and (ii) by computing the mutual information function at a distance k. We show how the quality of phylogenetic reconstruction depends on the range of correlation strengths and on the length of the underlying sequence segment. This concept of the correlation pattern as a phylogenetic signature of eukaryote species combines two rather distant domains of research, namely phylogenetic analysis based on molecular observation and the study of the correlation structure of DNA sequences.     

植物群落构建机制研究进展

群落构建研究对于解释物种共存和物种多样性的维持是至关重要的,因此一直是生态学研究的中心论题。尽管近年来关于生态位和中性理论的验证研究已经取得了显著的成果,但对于局域群落构建机制的认识仍存在很大争议。随着统计和理论上的进步使得用功能性状和群落谱系结构解释群落构建机制变为可能,主要是通过验证共存物种的性状和谱系距离分布模式来实现。然而,谱系和功能性状不能相互替代,多种生物和非生物因子同时控制着群落构建,基于中性理论的扩散限制、基于生态位的环境过滤和竞争排斥等多个过程可能同时影响着群落的构建。所以,综合考虑多种方法和影响因素探讨植物群落的构建机制,对于预测和解释植被对干扰的响应,理解生物多样性维持机制有重要意义。试图在简要回顾群落构建理论及研究方法发展的基础上,梳理其最新研究进展,并探讨整合功能性状及群落谱系结构的研究方法,解释群落构建和物种多样性维持机制的可能途径。在结合功能性状和谱系结构研究群落构建时,除了考虑空间尺度、环境因子、植被类型外,还应该关注时间尺度、选择性状的种类和数量、性状的种内变异、以及人为干扰等因素对群落构建的影响。     

Patterns of taxonomic diversity and relatedness among native and non-indigenous bryozoans

Aim The likelihood of a species successfully passing through all stages of the human‐mediated invasion process and becoming established at new locations is often determined by phenotypic characteristics. Among species, phenotypic similarity is negatively correlated with phylogenetic distance, but examples of independent evolution of traits in unrelated taxa do exist. Using marine bryozoans as model organisms we predict that, given the selectivity of the invasion process, the phylogenetic relatedness among established non‐indigenous species in a region is either higher or lower than that among the native assemblage, but not the same. Location Sixteen port and marina environments around New Zealand (the principal sites of establishment of most non‐indigenous bryozoans), and coastal habitats of the entire New Zealand coastline. Methods We use average taxonomic distinctness (avTD) as a measure of phylogenetic relatedness and taxonomic ‘breadth’ of species assemblages. We compare values of avTD between native and non‐indigenous bryozoan assemblages at two spatial scales and examine whether assemblages in port environments represent phylogenetically restricted and morphologically distinct subsets of the regional coastal bryofauna. Results At a nationwide and a local scale, the phylogenetic relatedness among non‐indigenous bryozoans was no different from that among members of the native assemblage. However, native bryozoans inhabiting port and marina environments had a significantly reduced taxonomic breadth and higher phylogenetic relatedness than the pool of ‘available’ native bryozoans from surrounding coastal habitats. Non‐indigenous species were on average six times more prevalent than native species in ports. There were no differences in morphological characteristics between native and non‐indigenous bryozoans from ports and natural environments. Main conclusion We found no evidence that a successful passage through the stages of the invasion process results in a taxonomically distinct non‐indigenous assemblage. However, patterns of relatedness among native and among non‐indigenous species may be influenced by the nature of the study environment.     

Similarities between invaders and native species: Moving past Darwin's naturalization conundrum

Darwin's naturalization conundrum states that successful invaders must be closely related to native species to possess the traits to tolerate that environment, but distantly related enough to possess traits allowing exploitation of underutilized niches, thereby minimizing competition. Although influential, this hypothesis is based on several simplistic assumptions. In particular, the relationship among phylogenetic relatedness, similarity, and competition is more complex than assumed and changes with spatial and phylogenetic scale. Competitive interactions are determined by limiting similarity and trait hierarchies associated with separate traits. Successful invaders thus need to be similar to native species in some respects, but different in others. This combination of similarities and differences is unlikely to be conserved. Further, many invasive species are represented in their novel range by genotypes with extreme trait values or plasticity relative to the species mean. Selection for these genotypes may alter the similarity between invasive and native species, thus obscuring the relationship between competition and phylogenetic relatedness. As environmental filtering and competition often act on different spatial scales, approaches assessing how individual traits relate to invasion at these scales (species pools vs local community) may improve our understanding of the relationship between similarity and invasion.     

Co-occurrence of tree species at fine spatial scale in a woodland cerrado,southeastern Brazil

Species co-occurrence at fine spatial scales is expected to be nonrandom in relation to species phylogenetic relatedness and functional similarity. On the one hand, closely related species that occur together and experience similar environmental conditions are likely to share phenotypic traits due to the process of environmental filtering. On the other hand, species that are too similar are unlikely to co-occur due to competitive exclusion. We surveyed a woodland cerrado, southeastern Brazil, to test whether co-occurrence in tree species shows functional or phylogenetic structuring at fine spatial scale. Searching for correlations between an index of species co-occurrence and both functional trait differences and phylogenetic distances, we provided evidence for a predominant role of environment filters in determining the co-occurrence of functionally similar tree species in cerrado. However, we did not find any effect of phylogenetic relatedness on tree species co-occurrence. We suggest that the phylogenetic relatedness of co-occurring cerrado tree species did not present a pattern, because the species functional traits were randomly distributed on the phylogeny. Thus, phylogenetic relatedness and functional similarity do not seem to limit the co-occurrence at fine spatial scale of cerrado tree species.     

Phylogenetic community structure in Minnesota oak savanna is influenced by spatial extent and environmental variation

The relative importance of environmental filtering, biotic interactions and neutral processes in community assembly remains an openly debated question and one that is increasingly addressed using phylogenetic approaches. Closely related species may occur together more frequently than expected (phylogenetic clustering) if environmental filtering operates on traits with significant phylogenetic signal. Recent studies show that phylogenetic clustering tends to increase with spatial scale, presumably because greater environmental variation is encompassed at larger spatial scales, providing opportunities for species to sort across environmental gradients. However, if environmental filtering is the cause of species sorting along environmental gradients, then environmental variation rather than spatial scale per se should drive the processes governing community assembly. Using species abundance and light availability data from a long‐term experiment in Minnesota oak savanna understory communities, we explicitly test the hypothesis that greater environmental variation results in greater phylogenetic clustering when spatial scale is held constant. Concordant with previous studies, we found that phylogenetic community structure varied with spatial extent. At the landscape scale (~1000 ha), communities were phylogenetically clustered. At the local scale (0.375ha), phylogenetic community structure varied among plots. As hypothesized, plots encompassing the greatest environmental variation in light availability exhibited the strongest phylogenetic clustering. We also found strong correlations between species functional traits, particularly specific leaf area (SLA) and perimeter per area (PA), and species light availability niche. There was also a phylogenetic signal in both functional traits and species light availability niche, providing a mechanistic explanation for phylogenetic clustering in relation to light availability. We conclude that the pattern of increased phylogenetic clustering with increased environmental variation is a consequence of environmental filtering acting on phylogenetically conserved functional traits. These results indicate that the importance of environmental filtering in community assembly depends not on spatial scale per se, but on the steepness of the environmental gradient.     

Phylogenetic imputation of plant functional trait databases

Continental‐scale maps of plant functional diversity are a fundamental piece of data of interest to ecosystem modelers and ecologists, yet such maps have been exceedingly hard to generate. The large effort to compile global plant functional trait databases largely for the purpose of mapping and analyzing the spatial distribution of function has resulted in very sparse data matrices thereby limiting progress. Identifying robust methodologies to gap fill or impute trait values in these databases is an important objective. Here I argue that existing statistical tools from phylogenetic comparative methods can be used to rapidly impute values into global plant functional trait databases due to the large amount of phylogenetic signal often in trait data. In particular, statistical models of phylogenetic signal in traits can be generated from existing data and used to predict missing values of closely related species often with a high degree of accuracy thereby facilitating the continental‐scale mapping of plant function. Despite the promise of this approach, I also discuss potential pitfalls and future challenges that will need to be addressed.     

Native communities determine the identity of exotic invaders even at scales at which communities are unsaturated

Aim To determine why some communities are more invasible than others and how this depends on spatial scale. Our previous work in serpentine ecosystems showed that native and exotic diversity are negatively correlated at small scales, but became positively correlated at larger scales. We hypothesized that this pattern was the result of classic niche partitioning at small scales where the environment is homogeneous, and a shift to the dominance of coexistence mechanisms that depend on spatial heterogeneity in the environment at large scales. Location Serpentine ecosystem, Northern California. Methods We test the above hypotheses using the phylogenetic relatedness of natives and exotics. We hypothesized that (1) at small scales, native and exotic species should be more distantly related than expected from a random assemblage model because with biotic resistance, successful invaders should have niches that are different from those of the natives present and (2) at large scales, native and exotic species should not be more distantly related than expected. Result We find strong support for the first hypothesis providing further evidence of biotic resistance at small scales. However, at large scales, native and exotic species were also more distantly related than expected. Importantly, however, natives and exotics were more distantly related at small scales than they were at large scales, suggesting that in the transition from small to large scales, biotic resistance is relaxed but still present. Communities at large scales were not saturated in the sense that more species could enter the community, increasing species richness. However, species did not invade indiscriminately. Exotic species closely related to species already established the community were excluded. Main conclusions Native communities determine the identity of exotic invaders even at large spatial scales where communities are unsaturated. These results hold promise for predicting which species will invade a community given the species present.     

An evolutionary perspective on caching by corvids

A principal finding in the food-caching literature is that species differences in hoarding propensity are positively correlated with species differences in degree of adaptations to caching behaviour, such as performance on spatial memory tasks and hippocampal volume. However, there are examples that do not fit this pattern. We argue that these examples can be better understood by considering the phylogenetic relatedness between species. We reconstruct the ancestral state for caching behaviour in corvids and assess when transitions in caching behaviour occurred within the corvid phylogeny. Our analysis shows that the common ancestor of all corvids was a moderate cacher. This result suggests that corvids followed a bi-directional evolutionary trajectory in which caching was secondarily lost twice and there were at least two independent transitions from moderate to specialized caching. The independent evolution of specialized cachers in the two groups must, therefore, be a case of convergent evolution. This is exemplified by the fact that specialized cachers show structurally different adaptations serving the same function to intense caching, such as different pouches to transport food. Finally, we argue that convergent evolution may have led to adaptations in memory and hippocampus that serve the same function but differ in design, and that these different adaptations may explain the examples that do not fit the pattern predicted by the adaptive specialization hypothesis.     

植物种群空间分布的点格局分析

植物种群在群落中的分布格局与空间尺度有着密切关系,传统的样方取样及其格局分析方法,只能分析一种尺度下的格局。本文引入一种新的格局分析方法--点格局分析,其是以种群空间分布的坐标点图为基础,通过本文对美国密西根州克林顿县栎林3个优势种格局分析,它有3个明显的优点：1）能够分析各种尺度下的种群格局和种间关系,结果清楚,直观;2）所描述的结果更符合实际,尤其是对群落结构的描述;3）它有利于定点观察,研究时间与种群格局的关系,本文分析的3个种集群特征明显,但随尺度的变化有不同的分布趋势,3个种间的关系也是如此。     

Taxonomic homogenization in ungulates: patterns and mechanisms at local and global scales

Aim The aim of this paper is to examine taxonomic homogenization in ungulates globally and at the local scale in South Africa. Specifically, we aim to examine the roles of distance, scale, time, extinctions vs. introductions, and extralimital vs. extraregional introductions in the homogenization of ungulate biotas, and to determine pathways of introduction of ungulate species globally and the proximate explanatory variables of ungulate introductions in South Africa. Location Forty‐one countries globally and three spatial resolutions in South Africa. Methods Indigenous, extirpated and established introduced ungulate species data were obtained for countries globally, and at a quarter‐degree grid‐cell resolution in South Africa. Homogenization was calculated using Jaccard’s index of similarity (JI) for countries globally and for three spatial resolutions in South Africa. Zoo holdings and transfer data from the International Species Information System database were used to investigate the relationship between non‐indigenous ungulate species introductions and the number of non‐indigenous ungulate species in zoos. Relationships between JI and species richness, and between numbers of introductions and several environmental and social factors were examined using generalized linear models. Results Homogenization in ungulates was 2% for countries globally and 8% at the coarsest resolution in South Africa. Homogenization increased with increasing resolution and with time, but it decreased with increasing percentage change in species richness. Globally, introductions contributed more to homogenization than did extinctions. Within South Africa, extralimital introductions contributed more to the homogenization of ungulate assemblages than did extraregional ones, and ungulates were typically introduced to high‐income areas with high human population and livestock densities. The same was not true in the past, when ungulates were introduced to ungulate species‐poor areas. The number of non‐indigenous ungulate species established in a country is significantly related to the number of non‐indigenous ungulate species in zoos in the country, possibly owing to sales of surplus animals from zoos. Main conclusions Ungulate faunas are homogenized at both the global scale and in South Africa, with extralimital introductions being of considerable significance regionally. In consequence, increasing attention will have to be given to the conservation consequences of ungulate translocations, both within particular geopolitical regions and across the globe.     

Spatial scale and dispersion pattern of ant- and bird-dispersed herbs in two tropical lowland rain forests

The population level correlates of contrasting dispersal syndromes in closely related species are largely unknown. A family of tropical understory herbs, the Marantaceae, provides the opportunity for comparative studies as it contains many species with contrasting dispersal syndromes. As part of a study of the comparative population biology of ant- and bird-dispersed species, we test the hypothesis that spatial scale and dispersion pattern are related to dispersal type, proposing that bird-dispersed species will have a larger spatial scale than ant-dispersed species, and that, among bird-dispersed species, the scale will vary among three distinct dispersal types. We also propose that ant-dispersed species will show a more clumped dispersion pattern than the bird-dispersed species. Two types of spatial scale are examined: the amount of space occupied by individuals (maximum and actual) and the spacing among individuals within populations. The maximum size of plants showed a trend in the predicted direction. However, this trend was only of marginal statistical significance. The actual distribution of plant sizes, as measured by total leaf area and classified logarithmically, differed significantly among the dispersal types in the predicted direction. Spacing among individuals as measured by nearest neighbor distances also varied significantly by dispersal type, but not entirely in the predicted direction. Dispersion pattern analysis indicated that most study species in most populations had significantly clumped spatial patterning. The aggregation index varied 20-fold among study plots, but did not vary significantly by dispersal type. We conclude that while spatial scale was related generally to type of dispersal, dispersion pattern was not.     

Assembly mechanisms shaping tropical litter ant communities

Community ecology seeks to unravel the mechanisms that allow species to coexist in space. Some of the contending mechanisms may generate tractable signatures in the amount of trait and phylogenetic dispersion among co‐existing species. When a community presents a pattern with reduced trait or phylogenetic dispersion, mechanisms based on ecological filters are brought into consideration. On the other hand, limiting similarity mechanisms such as competitive exclusion are proposed when communities present patterns of trait or phylogenetic even‐dispersion. The strength of these mechanisms likely varies with the spatial scale of an observed sample. I surveyed species‐rich tropical litter ant communities in a spatially nested design that allowed me to explore the spatial scales, fine (0.25 m²), intermediate (9 m²), and broad (361 m²) at which these mechanisms act. I then assessed the relationship between observed ant communities and potential species pools ranging in size, from plot, site, and island‐wide areas. Patterns of phylogenetic dispersion within ant communities suggested that ant communities were composed of species that were more closely related than expected by a random sampling of phylogenetic pools. The magnitude of phylogenetic ‘clustering’ increased with the size of the species pool but was similar among communities assembled from different spatial scales. Patterns of dispersion of one ecological trait (i.e. body size) within ant communities also showed clustering of body sizes, and most communities were composed of ant species that were smaller than expected by a random sampling of trait pools. Trait clustering increased with the size of the species pool but decreased at broad spatial scales. Together, these results suggest that ecological filters, not interspecific interactions, are structuring tropical ant communities, favoring clades with small worker sizes. The larger dependency on the size of regional pools than on the spatial scale suggests that environmental heterogeneity is greater among than within the study sites.     

Measuring biodiversity to explain community assembly: a unified approach

One of the oldest challenges in ecology is to understand the processes that underpin the composition of communities. Historically, an obvious way in which to describe community compositions has been diversity in terms of the number and abundances of species. However, the failure to reject contradictory models has led to communities now being characterized by trait and phylogenetic diversities. Our objective here is to demonstrate how species, trait and phylogenetic diversity can be combined together from large to local spatial scales to reveal the historical, deterministic and stochastic processes that impact the compositions of local communities. Research in this area has recently been advanced by the development of mathematical measures that incorporate trait dissimilarities and phylogenetic relatedness between species. However, measures of trait diversity have been developed independently of phylogenetic measures and conversely most of the phylogenetic diversity measures have been developed independently of trait diversity measures. This has led to semantic confusions particularly when classical ecological and evolutionary approaches are integrated so closely together. Consequently, we propose a unified semantic framework and demonstrate the importance of the links among species, phylogenetic and trait diversity indices. Furthermore, species, trait and phylogenetic diversity indices differ in the ways they can be used across different spatial scales. The connections between large‐scale, regional and local processes allow the consideration of historical factors in addition to local ecological deterministic or stochastic processes. Phylogenetic and trait diversity have been used in large‐scale analyses to determine how historical and/or environmental factors affect both the formation of species assemblages and patterns in species richness across latitude or elevation gradients. Both phylogenetic and trait diversity have been used at different spatial scales to identify the relative impacts of ecological deterministic processes such as environmental filtering and limiting similarity from alternative processes such as random speciation and extinction, random dispersal and ecological drift. Measures of phylogenetic diversity combine phenotypic and genetic diversity and have the potential to reveal both the ecological and historical factors that impact local communities. Consequently, we demonstrate that, when used in a comparative way, species, trait and phylogenetic structures have the potential to reveal essential details that might act simultaneously in the assembly of species communities. We highlight potential directions for future research. These might include how variation in trait and phylogenetic diversity alters with spatial distances, the role of trait and phylogenetic diversity in global‐scale gradients, the connections between traits and phylogeny, the importance of trait rarity and independent evolutionary history in community assembly, the loss of trait and phylogenetic diversity due to human impacts, and the mathematical developments of biodiversity indices including within‐species variations.     

Integrating trait and phylogenetic distances to assess scale‐dependent community assembly processes

Biodiversity is structured by multiple mechanisms that are dependent, at least in part, on ecological similarities and differences among species. Integrating traits and phylogenies in diversity metrics may provide deeper insight into community assembly processes across spatial scales. However, different traits are influenced by processes at different spatial scales, and it is not clear how trait‐spatial scale mismatches skew our ability to detect assembly patterns. An additional complexity is how phylogenetic distances, which might capture unmeasured traits, reflect spatially dependent processes. Here we analyze a freshwater zooplankton dataset from 91 ponds and show that different traits are associated with processes at different spatial scales. We first assessed the response of individual traits to processes at both α‐ and β‐scales, and then quantified the power of different combinations of traits and phylogenetic distances to reveal environmental and spatial drivers of α‐ and β‐diversity. We found that explanatory power was maximised when we accounted for environmental and spatial drivers with single, but different traits for α‐ and β‐diversity. Using the most appropriate trait for each spatial scale outperformed phylogenetic information, but phylogenetic information outperformed the same traits when these were used at the wrong spatial scale, and all outperformed taxonomic analyses that ignore trait and phylogenetic information. We demonstrate that accounting for species’ similarities and differences provides important information about dominant assembly mechanisms at different spatial scales, and that phylogeny is especially useful when measured traits are uninformative at a given spatial scale or when there is lack of trait data. Our study also indicates, however, that trait‐scale mismatches among phylogenetically conserved traits may affect the performance of phylogenetic indices compared to indices that account only for the best single trait at each spatial scale.     

A phylogenetic approach towards understanding the drivers of plant invasiveness on Robben Island,South Africa

Invasive plant species are a considerable threat to ecosystems globally and on islands in particular where species diversity can be relatively low. In this study, we examined the phylogenetic basis of invasion success on Robben Island in South Africa. The flora of the island was sampled extensively and the phylogeny of the local community was reconstructed using the two core DNA barcode regions, rbcLa and matK. By analysing the phylogenetic patterns of native and invasive floras at two different scales, we found that invasive alien species are more distantly related to native species, a confirmation of Darwin's naturalization hypothesis. However, this pattern also holds even for randomly generated communities, therefore discounting the explanatory power of Darwin's naturalization hypothesis as the unique driver of invasion success on the island. These findings suggest that the drivers of invasion success on the island may be linked to species traits rather than their evolutionary history alone, or to the combination thereof. This result also has implications for the invasion management programmes currently being implemented to rehabilitate the native diversity on Robben Island. © 2013 The Linnean Society of London, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 2013, 172 , 142–152.     

Phylogenetic conservatism of environmental niches in mammals

Phylogenetic niche conservatism is the pattern where close relatives occupy similar niches, whereas distant relatives are more dissimilar. We suggest that niche conservatism will vary across clades in relation to their characteristics. Specifically, we investigate how conservatism of environmental niches varies among mammals according to their latitude, range size, body size and specialization. We use the Brownian rate parameter, σ(2), to measure the rate of evolution in key variables related to the ecological niche and define the more conserved group as the one with the slower rate of evolution. We find that tropical, small-ranged and specialized mammals have more conserved thermal niches than temperate, large-ranged or generalized mammals. Partitioning niche conservatism into its spatial and phylogenetic components, we find that spatial effects on niche variables are generally greater than phylogenetic effects. This suggests that recent evolution and dispersal have more influence on species' niches than more distant evolutionary events. These results have implications for our understanding of the role of niche conservatism in species richness patterns and for gauging the potential for species to adapt to global change.     

Patterns of endemism in African birds: how much does taxonomy matter?

It has been suggested that the 'right' biogeographic patterns will only arise with a species concept reflecting the finest splitting of terminal phylogenetic branches. The significance of taxonomic resolution was assessed using distributional data for all resident African land-birds, held at the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen. The primary database (in a one-degree geographical grid) served as a template for creating two new databases: one, where the distributional records were allocated to species according to the 'Speciation Atlases' for African birds (Hall and Moreau 1970, Snow 1978) and two, according to the finest taxonomic splitting that has since then been suggested in the literature. With this spatial resolution, the species richness pattern is almost exactly the same whether old or new taxonomy is used. The endemism follows another pattern with marked local aggregates. The location of principal aggregates are quite robust to recent splitting, although a slightly more complex structure appears. Also some small new areas of endemism emerge, each with 2–3 narrow endemics. However, large portions of African savannah and lowland rainforest are still characterised by a total lack of narrow endemism. Based on the current understanding of diversification processes and adaptive re-distribution it is suggested that the uneven distribution of narrowly endemic and widespread species will persist even if it were possible, in the future, to define terminal taxa in a consistent way.