Rethinking ecological expectations from evolutionary models

The use of phylogenetic relatedness has greatly influenced community assembly research Researchers often examine patterns of pairwise phylogenetic distances or total summed phylogenetic branch lengths to determine if communities contain species that are more or less closely related than expected by chance, or if communities contain more or less diversity than expected, respectively. Yet despite the simple logic behind these tests, the implicit assumption is that phylogenetic distances correlate with ecological differences. However, evolutionary models can be used to generate patterns of ecological difference, and actual relationships between phylogenetic distance and ecological difference can be much more complicated than assumed.