A guide to phylogenetic metrics for conservation, community ecology and macroecology

By Caroline M. Tucker, Marc W. Cadotte, S. Carvalho, T. Jonathan Davies, Simon Ferrier, Susanne A. Fritz, R. Grenyer, Matthew R. Helmus, Lanna S. Jin, Arne O. Mooers and 6 more. Biological Reviews of The Cambridge Philosophical Society, 2016

787 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The use of phylogenies in ecology is increasingly common and has broadened our understanding of biological diversity. Ecological sub‐disciplines, particularly conservation, community ecology and macroecology, all recognize the value of evolutionary relationships but the resulting development of phylogenetic approaches has led to a proliferation of phylogenetic diversity metrics. The use of many metrics across the sub‐disciplines hampers potential meta‐analyses, syntheses, and generalizations of existing results. Further, there is no guide for selecting the appropriate metric for a given question, and different metrics are frequently used to address similar questions. To improve the choice, application, and interpretation of phylo‐diversity metrics, we organize existing metrics by expanding on a unifying framework for phylogenetic information.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/72e9aa65e31f2bff26804e4c083bf26be9acd409

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Citations in the corpus

Using functional and phylogenetic diversity to infer avian community assembly along elevational gradients (2019, neutral): “PD relates to phylogenetic richness and sums the quantity of phylogenetic differences present in the assemblage, whereas MPD is a divergence‐based phylogenetic dispersion metric (Tucker et al., 2017; Webb et al., 2002).”
Aboveground carbon storage is driven by functional trait composition and stand structural attributes rather than biodiversity in temperate mixed forests recovering from disturbances (2018, methodology): “Mean pairwise phylogenetic distance (MPD) and mean nearest taxon distance (MNTD) represent a different measurement of evolution information among species, which are commonly used in many recent studies (Erikson et al. 2014; Tucker et al. 2017).”
Difficult decisions: Strategies for conservation prioritization when taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity are not spatially congruent (2018, background): “Indeed, at the wholeassemblage scale, species richness, phylogenetic diversity, and functional diversity are not independent, since the functional diversity and phylogenetic diversity metrics necessarily sum across the species present (Pavoine and Bonsall, 2011; Tucker et al., 2017).”
Dos and don'ts when inferring assembly rules from diversity patterns (2020, background): “…al., 2015) and the fine-scale spatial arrangement of individuals (Diekmann, Law & Metz, 2000), can lead to the underlying processes being overlooked because their effects may not scale up to large-scale diversity patterns (Araujo & Rozenfeld, 2014; Thuiller et al., 2010; Turcotte & Levine, 2016).”