Community assembly in subtidal epibenthic invertebrate communities in the Gulf of Maine: A community phylogenetic and functional trait approach

How organisms assemble to form a community is a central question in ecology, with commonly inferred mechanisms including environmental filtering, competitive exclusion, and random processes. Community phylogenetic and functional trait analyses have been used to identify the relative importance of these processes, most often in terrestrial angiosperm systems consisting of a single taxon (e.g., class). Here, community phylogenetic and functional trait analyses are applied to multiphyletic subtidal epibenthic invertebrate assemblages at eight sites in the Gulf of Maine, to investigate the relative importance of deterministic or stochastic forces in structuring these communities. At local sites, some communities were phylogenetically overdispersed, suggesting community assembly via competitive exclusion. Five traits exhibited phylogenetic signal and for these traits, phylogeny can be used as a proxy for ecological similarity. Functional trait diversity was overdispersed for one site and clu..., To conduct a community phylogenetic analysis for subtidal epibenthic invertebrate species at 8 sites in the Gulf of Maine, 3 data sets were used: a phylogenetic tree, a species by site presence-absence matrix, and functional trait information. The site presence-absence matrix was created from data found in Table 1 from Miller and Etter (2011) using the species on vertical surfaces only, and the other two datasets are described below.
Dataset 1—Bayesian newick tree
DNA was extracted and amplified from 50 invertebrate species or downloaded from GenBank and 18S sequences aligned, checked by eye, and trimmed at the beginning and end to minimize gaps. The general time-reversible (GTR) model of evolution was selected, with an estimated proportion of DNA sites invariant (I), and mutation rates among sites following a gamma distribution (G). The GTR+I+G model was then used to estimate a Bayesian gene tree with a ‘Bootstrapping procedure’ (100 times) to assess support for tree nodes.
Dataset 2—T..., , # Community assembly in subtidal epibenthic invertebrate communities in the Gulf of Maine: A community phylogenetic and functional trait approach

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.np5hqc04s](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.np5hqc04s)

## Description of the data and file structure

These data represent files used to conduct a community phylogenetic analysis for subtidal epibenthic invertebrate species at 8 sites in the Gulf of Maine.

### Files and variables

Dataset 1—Bayesian Newick tree (bayesian_newick_tree.txt)

This is presented in Newick format and contains the names of the names of the species at the tips of the tree, the branching relationships between the species, and the length of each branch.

Dataset 2—Trait data (trait_data.csv)

This data is arranged in columns. The first column contains species names for subtidal epibenthic invertebrates in the Gulf of Maine. All other column headers represent an important functional trait that covers a range of life history, morphological, a...,