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  1. Abstract Aim

    Alternative hypotheses of Darwin's Naturalization Conundrum (DNC) predict that the non‐native species that successfully establish within a community are those either more closely or more distantly related to the resident native species. Despite the increasing number of studies using phylogenetic data to testDNCand evaluate community assembly, it remains unknown whether phylogenetic relationships alone can be used to predict invasion susceptibility across communities differing environmentally and in disturbance history. In this study, we evaluate whether phylogenetic structure of diverse native communities predicts the occurrence of non‐native species and offers insight into community assembly.

    Location

    Eastern United States of America.

    Methods

    We examine multiple communities across a north–south transect of the eastern United States to test whether non‐native species richness and abundance are associated with phylogenetic diversity measures of the native community. We also test whether non‐native species are consistently closely or distantly related to native species using two approaches differing in phylogenetic scale and whether this differs with ecologically successful species.

    Results

    Our analyses did not unambiguously resolveDNC. Non‐native species richness and abundance decreased with increasing native species phylogenetic diversity. Within some communities, non‐native species were significantly more closely related to native species than expected by chance, and tended to be more often closely related to a native species than that native species was to other native relatives. When considering species abundance, only one community showed that ecologically successful non‐native species were closely related to resident species.

    Main conclusions

    Phylogenetic relationships can reveal important details about community assembly in diverse ecological settings. However, given the multifaceted nature of community assembly, phylogenetic metrics alone have limited utility as a general predictive tool for community invasion. Our study highlights a need to incorporate additional types of data to better understand why some communities are more susceptible to non‐native species establishment.

     
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  2. Polyploidy is widely acknowledged to have played an important role in the evolution and diversification of vascular plants. However, the influence of genome duplication on population-level dynamics and its cascading effects at the community level remain unclear. In part, this is due to persistent uncertainties over the extent of polyploid phenotypic variation, and the interactions between polyploids and co-occurring species, and highlights the need to integrate polyploid research at the population and community level. Here, we investigate how community-level patterns of phylogenetic relatedness might influence escape from minority cytotype exclusion, a classic population genetics hypothesis about polyploid establishment, and population-level species interactions. Focusing on two plant families in which polyploidy has evolved multiple times, Brassicaceae and Rosaceae, we build upon the hypothesis that the greater allelic and phenotypic diversity of polyploids allow them to successfully inhabit a different geographic range compared to their diploid progenitor and close relatives. Using a phylogenetic framework, we specifically test (1) whether polyploid species are more distantly related to diploids within the same community than co-occurring diploids are to one another, and (2) if polyploid species tend to exhibit greater ecological success than diploids, using species abundance in communities as an indicator of successful establishment. Overall, our results suggest that the effects of genome duplication on community structure are not clear-cut. We find that polyploid species tend to be more distantly related to co-occurring diploids than diploids are to each other. However, we do not find a consistent pattern of polyploid species being more abundant than diploid species, suggesting polyploids are not uniformly more ecologically successful than diploids. While polyploidy appears to have some important influences on species co-occurrence in Brassicaceae and Rosaceae communities, our study highlights the paucity of available geographically explicit data on intraspecific ploidal variation. The increased use of high-throughput methods to identify ploidal variation, such as flow cytometry and whole genome sequencing, will greatly aid our understanding of how such a widespread, radical genomic mutation influences the evolution of species and those around them. 
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