Trait patterns across space and time suggest an interplay of facilitation and competition acting on Neotropical hummingbird-pollinated plant communities

Pollinators may influence plant community assembly through biotic filtering and/or plant-plant competition and facilitation. The relative importance of each process, however, vary according to the scale and how strongly plants share their pollinators, and possibly in relation to the pollinator groups considered. We here investigated the assembly of three Atlantic forest hummingbird-pollinated plant communities across space (among all species in the communities) and time, i.e. yearly flowering phenology (between pairs of co-flowering species), based on the pairwise distances of multiple floral traits (corolla length, anther and stigma height, colour and nectar). Because tropical hummingbird-pollinated plants are often subdivided in two pollination niches (hermits vs. non-hermits), we also analyzed these groups separately. We found that trait structure across space was clustered for some floral traits, suggesting biotic filtering and facilitation. All floral traits had weak phylogenetic s...