Nutrient-based species selection is a prevalent driver of community assembly and functional trait space in tropical forests

1. Soil nutrient availability and functional traits interact in complex ways during the assembly of tree communities hindering our understanding of the implications that this may have for their phylogenetic and functional diversity.
2. We combined abundance, taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional trait data of 222 tree species distributed along nutrient concentration gradients at twenty-four plots in two tropical forest study sites. We analysed micro and macronutrient concentration in organic and topsoil horizons and tested for: (1) nutrient-based species sorting due to contrasting trait-environment relationships; (2) whether nutrient filtering has consequences for phylogenetic and functional diversity, and functional space size and occupancy; and (3) we mapped trait distributions across the phylogeny of tree species to track the evolutionary signature of nutrient availability.
3. We found that total nitrogen (N), available phosphorus and total potassium in soil accounted for 68% of th..., Data collected during fieldwork campaigns in French Guiana.
Tree community data: Abundance, taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional trait data of 222 tree species distributed along nutrient concentration gradients at twenty-four plots in two tropical forest study sites in French Guiana.
Soil nutrient concentration data: Micro and macronutrient concentration in organic and topsoil horizons from each study plot., All the analyses where carried out with R software and the code is therefore provided in R programming language.