Effects of species' similarity and dominance on the functional and phylogenetic structure of a plant meta-community

Different assembly processes drive the spatial structure of meta-communities (β-diversity). Recently, functional and phylogenetic diversities have been suggested as indicators of these assembly processes. Assuming that diversity is a good proxy for niche overlap, high β-diversity along environmental gradients should be the result of environmental filtering while low β-diversity should stem from competitive interactions. So far, studies trying to disentangle the relative importance of these assembly processes have provided mixed results. One reason for this may be that these studies often rely on a single measure of diversity and thus implicitly make a choice on how they account for species relative abundances and how species similarities are captured by functional traits or phylogeny.

Here, we tested the effect of gradually scaling the importance of dominance (the weight given to dominant vs. rare species) and species similarity (the weight given to small vs. large similarities) on resulting β-diversity patterns of an alpine plant meta-community. To this end, we combined recent extensions of the Hill numbers framework with Pagel's phylogenetic tree transformation approach. We included functional (based on the leaf–height–seed spectrum) and phylogenetic facets of β-diversity in our analysis and explicitly accounted for effects of environmental and spatial covariates.

We found that functional β-diversity was high when the same weight was given to dominant vs. rare species and to large vs. small species' similarities. In contrast, phylogenetic β-diversity was low when greater weight was given to dominant species and small species' similarities. Those results suggested that different environments along the gradients filtered different species according to their functional traits, while, the same competitive lineages dominated communities across the gradients.

Our results highlight that functional vs. phylogenetic facets, presence-absence vs. abundance structure and different weights of species' dissimilarity provide complementary and important information on the drivers of meta-community structure. By utilizing the full extent of information provided by the flexible frameworks of Hill numbers and Pagel's tree transformation, we propose a new approach to disentangle the patterns resulting from different assembly processes.