Disentangling the fundamental branching patterns of phylogenetic divergence to refine eco-phylogenetic analyses

Aim: Previous studies have shown that phylogenetic divergence (i.e. the average phylogenetic displacement between species in a community) is highly sensitive to the underlying branching patterns of phylogenies, suggesting that there is a need to integrate both facets of phylogenic information to obtain a better understanding of assemblage structure. Here, we formally conceptualize the three fundamental branching patterns that can drive phylogenetic divergence, and propose a method to identify their signature in the communities based on the MPD (mean pairwise distance) metric.

Location: Global.

Taxa: All.

Methods: Our approach consists on the joint interpretation of two MPD-derived metrics that summarize the differential contribution of individual phylogenetic branches to the observed divergence, which serves to evaluate to what extent the later emerges from contrasting branching patterns. We conduct simulation analyses to compare our two metrics with eight classical descriptors...