Data: fruit size of Indomalayan plants

Community trait assembly, the formation of distributions of phenotypic
characteristics across coexisting species, can occur via two main
processes: the filtering of trait distributions in the regional pool and
in situ phenotypic evolution in local communities. But the relative
importance of these processes remains unclear, largely because of the
difficulty in determining the timing of evolutionary trait changes and
biogeographic dispersal events in phylogenies. We assessed evolutionary
and biogeographic transitions in woody plant species across the Indo-Malay
Archipelago, a series of island groups where the same plant lineages
interact with different seed disperser and seed predator assemblages.
Fruit size in 2650 taxa spanning the angiosperm tree-of-life tended to be
smaller in the Sulawesi and Maluku island groups, where frugivores are
less diverse and smaller-bodied, than in the regional source pool. While
numerous plant lineages (not just small-fruited ones) reached the isolated
islands, colonists tended to be the smaller-fruited members of each clade.
Nearly all evolutionary transitions to smaller fruit size predated, often
substantially, organismal dispersal to the islands. Our results suggest
that filtering rather than within-island evolution largely determined the
distribution of fruit sizes in these regions.