Data for: Historical and contemporary processes drive global phylogenetic structure across geographical scales: Insights from bat communities

Aim: Patterns of evolutionary relatedness among co-occurring species are
driven by scale-dependent contemporary and historical processes. Yet, we
still lack a detailed understanding of how these drivers impact the
phylogenetic structure of biological communities. Here, we focused on bats
– one of the most speciose and vagile groups of mammals – and test the
predictions of three general biogeographical hypotheses that are
particularly relevant to understanding how paleoclimatic stability, local
diversification rates, and geographical scales shaped their present-day
phylogenetic community structure. Location: Worldwide, across restrictive
geographical extents: global, east-west hemispheres, biogeographical
realms, tectonic plates, biomes, and ecoregions. Time period: Last Glacial
Maximum (~22,000 years ago) to the present. Major taxa studied: Bats
(Chiroptera) Methods: We estimated bat phylogenetic community structure
across restrictive geographical extents and modelled it as a function of
paleoclimatic stability, and in situ net diversification rates. Results:
Limiting geographical extents from larger to smaller scales strongly
changed the phylogenetic structure of bat communities. The magnitude of
these effects is less noticeable in the western hemisphere, where frequent
among-realm biota interchange could have been maintained through
bats' adaptive traits. Highly phylogenetically related bat
communities are generally more common in regions that changed less in
climate since the last glacial maximum, supporting the expectation that
stable climates allow for increased phylogenetic clustering. Finally,
increased in situ net diversification rates are associated with greater
phylogenetic clustering in bat communities. Main conclusions: We show that
the worldwide phylogenetic structure of bat assemblages varies as a
function of geographical extents, dispersal barriers, paleoclimatic
stability and in situ diversification. The integrative framework used in
our study, which can be applied to other taxonomic groups, has proven
useful to not only explain the evolutionary dynamics of community assembly
but could also help tackle questions related to scale dependence in
community ecology and biogeography.