Phylogenies help to uncover diversity patterns in Neotropical amphibians
1. PHYLOGENIES HELP TO UNCOVER
DIVERSITY PATTERNS IN
NEOTROPICAL AMPHIBIANS
Diogo B. Provete
Universidade Federal de Goiás
Goiânia, GO, Brazil
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Introduction
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Recent interest in incorporating phylogenetic
information into measures of biological diversity
Rationale: Phylogeny as a multivariate proxy for
traits (assuming phylogenetic signal)
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Introduction
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Habitat filtering/species sorting => environmental
variables in ponds (e.g., pond canopy cover and
hydroperiod)
Wellborn et al. 1996; Skelly et al. 2002; Werner et al. 2007
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Pond canopy cover
Floating vegetation
Werner et al. 2007
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I investigated the influence of pond canopy cover,
pond area, floating vegetation, and depth on linage
sorting in a metacommunity of pond tadpoles in a
mountain environment in SE Brazil
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Discussion
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Canopy cover => strong filter not only for species
but also for entire clades, this influence is on
deeper levels of the phylogeny
Differences in habitat use patterns among clades
Next step: inclusion of traits related to habitat use,
morphology, and reproductive modes => what
traits are being filtered?
14. Thank you!
dbprovete@gmail.com
Web site => http://bit.ly/frogs_atbc
Student Travel Award
Notas do Editor
There’s a growing interest in incorporating phylogenetic information into measures of biological diversity and also in investigating diversity patterns as we saw this morning in the talk by Dr. Faith. The rationale for this is that phylogeny represents a multivariate proxy for trait diversity, as long we assume that there is phylogenetic signal in traits.
Concurrently, environmental gradients have been shown to influence species sorting in freshwater metacommunities, specially pond canopy cover and hydroperiod
For example, pond canopy cover can be viewed as a productivity gradient in which closed-canopy ponds represent harsh environments that hold low species diversity. But we don’t have a good idea of what is the importance of these factors in lineage filtering of freshwater organisms.
So I investigate …
I sampled tadpoles in 13 ponds in the Serra da Bocaina National Park in SE Brazil, at the boudary between the states od SP and RJ
From june 2008 to july 2009, ponds were arranged along a canopy cover gradient
This is the spatial arrangement of ponds
I built a phylogenetic super-tree for species occurring in this metacommunity based on previous phylogenetic purproses, which was dated using the bladj algorithim of the Phylocom software. Then I extracted a patristic distance matrix from this phylogeny.
I rely on recent techniques to relate phylogenetic structure at the metacommunity level to environmental gradients, largely developed by Leandro Duarte and colaborators
This procedures briefly as follows: the species distance matrix is converted into a squared matrix the depicts the degrees of belonging of species, which is then multiplied by a site by species matrix to give the phylogeny-weighted species composition matrix, from which a series of principal coordenate eigenvectors called PCPS are extracted after a PCoA analysis. After a selection, these eigenVectors are included in a db-RDA analysis as response variables along with environmental variables as predictor variables. So with this technique I could relate the phylogeentic metacommunity structure to environmental variables.
And this is what I got. The first two PCPS were selected to be used in the db-RDA, which explained about 52% of the variation in phylogenetic metacommunity structure. Basically, hylid lineages were associated with increasing % of pond canopy cover. Floating vegetation separated the two main hylid clades: Cophomantini and Dendropsophryni. Calamitophrynia, the remainig clade were associated with open areas
In Conclusion, pond canopy cover seems to have a profound effect on amphibian metacommunity structure and is a strong filter not only for species but also for entire clades. These results are mainly related to differences in habitat use among clades at the landscape level. I suggest the traits related to habitat use, morphology and reproductive modes should be included in further analyses to answer what specific traits are being filtered.