Evolutionary history and environmental variability structure contemporary tropical vertebrate communities

Tropical regions harbor over half of the world’s mammals and birds, but how their communities have assembled over evolutionary timescales remains unclear. To compare eco-evolutionary assembly processes between tropical mammals and birds, we tested how hypotheses concerning niche conservatism, environmental stability, environmental heterogeneity, and time-for-speciation relate to tropical vertebrate community phylogenetic and functional structure. We used in-situ observations of species identified from systematic camera trap sampling as realized communities from 15 protected tropical rainforests in four tropical regions worldwide. We quantified standardized phylogenetic and functional structure for each community and estimated the multi-trait phylogenetic signal (PS) in ecological strategies for the four regional species pools of mammals and birds. Using linear regression models, we test three non-mutually exclusive hypotheses by comparing the relative importance of colonization time, pa..., , , # Evolutionary history and environmental variability structure contemporary tropical vertebrate communities

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ht76hdrpm](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ht76hdrpm)

This repository contains the data and R codes of standardized phylogenetic and functional community structure, multi-trait phylogenetic signals in ecological strategies, and all statistical analyses. The species-level phylogeny and ecological traits of mammals and birds used to measure community structures and multi-trait phylogenetic signals, as well as the environmental variables in this paper are all publicly available and can be accessed via the sources in the Sharing/Access information section. Species checklists of this study were obtained from the species occurrence data of the Tropical Ecology and Assessment Monitoring Network, which can be accessed through Wildlife Insights.

## Description of the data and file structure

We include the taxonomic names of mammals and birds used to match s...