Deep space for deep time: What NEON products can tell us about the evolution of species assembly

Modeling the ecological and evolutionary drivers of where species co-occur improves our understanding of biodiversity, species’ interactions, and vulnerability to global change. One way to describe how evolutionary history, or ‘deep time’, interacts with present-day ecology to shape communities is with species inventories that connect many local-scale observations across a broad region, or ‘deep space.’ NEON generates such inventories for multiple taxa, including plants, mammals, birds, and beetles. Combined with novel eco-phylogenetic tools, NEON data provide a unique opportunity to investigate how environmental sensitivities, within-guild interactions like competition, and cross-guild interactions like herbivory evolved to drive species assembly today.