Relationships among taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic ant diversity across the biogeographic regions of Europe

Understanding how different biodiversity components are related across different environmental conditions is a major goal in macroecology and conservation biogeography. We investigated correlations among alpha and beta taxonomic (TD), phylogenetic (PD), and functional diversity (FD) in ant communities in the five biogeographic regions most representative of western Europe; we also examined the degree of niche conservatism. We combined data from 349 ant communities composed of 154 total species, which were characterized by 10 functional traits and by phylogenetic relatedness. We computed TD, PD, and FD using the Rao quadratic entropy index, which allows each biodiversity component to be partitioned into α and β diversity within the same mathematical framework. We ran generalized least squares and multiple matrix regressions with randomization to investigate relationships among the diversity components. We used Pagel's λ test to explore niche conservatism in each biogeographic region. At ...