Meta-community phylogenetics: Evolutionary ecology at regional and biogeographic scales

Metacommunity ecology provides a framework to understand how assemblages of organisms are distributed in space by focusing on ecological processes of species interactions and dispersal.   Over larger spatial and temporal scales these processes also likely interact with evolutionary ones including speciation, trait diversification, and changes in geographic distribution.  It is currently unclear how to evaluate any such interaction of these metacommunity and phylogeographic processes.  I combined statistical methods related to ‘community phylogenetics’ with methods related to ‘metacommunity analysis’ to begin such an evaluation.  This method provides tools to evaluate the relative roles of niche adaptation, niche conservatism, vicariance, and dispersal limitation on patterns describing the distribution of species among local communities on scales that vary from relatively narrow regional biotas to those that span different such regions.  I illustrate the use of these methods using hypothetical test cases and data on zooplankton assemblages in North American lakes.