Data from: 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 plant lineages, and most species have native ranges in the New
World. There was strong phylogenetic signal for endemism, but not for
invasiveness. Conclusions: Community phylogenetics has high potential
value for conservation planning, particularly for fragmented and
endangered ecosystems like the pine rockland. Strong phylogenetic signal
for endemic species in our dataset, which also tend to be threatened or
endangered, can help to identify species at risk as well as fragments
where those species occur highlighting conservation priorities. Our
results indicate, at least in the pine rockland ecosystem, no phylogenetic
signal for invasive species, and thus other information must be used to
predict the potential for invasiveness.