Community phylogeny of the globally critically imperiled pine rockland ecosystem

Premise of the study: Community phylogenetic methods incorporate information on evolutionary relationships into studies of organismal assemblages. We used a community phylogenetic framework to investigate relationships and biogeographic affinities and calculate phylogenetic signal of endemism and invasiveness for the flora of the pine rocklands, a globally critically imperiled ecosystem with a significant portion of its distribution in South Florida, United States. Methods: We reconstructed phylogenetic relationships of 538 vascular plant taxa, which represents 92.28% of the vascular flora of the pine rocklands. We estimated phylogenetic signal for endemism and invasiveness using phylogenetic generalized linear mixed models. We determined the native range for each species in the dataset and calculated the total number of species sourced from each region and all possible combinations of these regions. Key results: The pine rockland flora includes representatives of all major vascular pla...