Phylogenetic structure of plant community, and its relationship with
environmental components
Abstract
The processes shaping the biological communities are ongoing debates.
Two theories of Niche and Neutral are the most accepted ones,
emphasizing on interspecific competition/environmental filtering, and
stochastic processes, respectively. Recently the subject is investigated
by incorporating phylogeny into ecological approaches. We investigated
plant communities structure in Kerman, Iran, by constructing
phylogenetic tree for the species pool using megatree of vascular plants
in R Package V.PhyloMaker2, and subsequently calculated communities’
phylogenetic diversity indices (PDI) of Faith, Net Relatedness index
(NRI) and Nearest Taxon index (NTI). Relationship of the indecis with
environmental components and species abundance was studied using R
Packages Picante and Vegan, respectively. The communities’ compositions
were calculated based on both abundance-weighted and phylogeny-weighted
species compositions, and their correlation was investigated by Mental
test. Similarity among the communities was evaluated by ordination
analyses of Non-metric Multidimensional Scaling (NMDS) and Principal
Coordinates of Phylogenetic Structure (PCPS), respectively. The
communities’ NRI and NTI values were positive and smaller than threshold
value of 1.96, indicating clustered structure of the communities,
highlighting environmental filtering role. Soil pH and moisture were
significantly correlated with NTI, but only soil moisture affected on
NRI. However, soil EC, altitude, slope degree and aspects did not affect
on NRI and NTI. None of the six environmental components affected the
communities’ species abundance. NMDS- and PCPS-wieghted communities’
compositions was not correlated. The results showed that the species
assemblage was determined by only environmental filtering, highlighting
importance of environmental factors rather than interspecific
competition in distribution of species in the region.