The ecological drivers of species assembly at broad spatial scales can be further informed by the inclusion of a broad temporal context, as provided by phylogeny. An increasingly common method of integrating phylogeny into community ecology is to contrast patterns of functional traits and phylogenetic assemblage structures. Such work, however, can relegate phylogeny to the role of proxy for (unmeasured) traits, and does not assess the evolution of environmental responses directly. To address this limitation, we modeled the evolution of traits and environmental sensitivity to test the hypothesis that species’ environmental tolerances evolved adaptively, and to assess whether this pattern is reflected in functional traits alone. We assembled regional species occurrence data for plants, birds, and mammals collected by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), Breeding Bird Survey, Forest Inventory and Analysis, and Thibault et al. 2011, as well as species-level trait data and site-level temperature data. We then contrasted the relative importance of species’ traits, phylogeny, and environmental responses through phylogenetic generalized linear mixed models (PGLMM) of species co-occurrences in response to temperature.
Results/Conclusions
Our preliminary results show that, while functional traits exhibit phylogenetic signal in all taxa, there is additional residual phylogenetic structure in species’ environmental tolerances. These results suggest that, by combining information about species’ evolution, functional traits, and present-day environmental responses, we can produce models that can make more powerful predictions about the evolution of species’ niches. We find support for the hypothesis that regional environmental filtering is more conserved than might be inferred from functional traits alone, suggesting that phylogeny combined with traits is a powerful tool to assess species’ niche structures. Furthermore, this analysis demonstrates the unique value of species inventories that connect local-scale observations across broad spatial regions (e.g. NEON products) for parsing the ecological and evolutionary drivers of species assembly.