Our review came along at the right time to catch the eye of ecologists starting to think more about the evolution of the species in their communities and of molecular systematists looking for new uses for their phylogenies.

“Modern phylogenetic information offers a “glue” that is helping to blur the disciplinary boundaries of evolutionary biology, biogeography, and community ecology.”

At the same time, interest in questions of community composition has been resurging after the release of Steve Hubbell’s book on neutral assembly theory (The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography, Princeton University Press, 2001) which also contained predictions for the phylogenetic structure of local and regional communities.

Aside from the questions themselves, this review is partly a product of the explosion in molecular biology data over the past 15 years.

It reviews various approaches and methods for combining phylogenetic trees and community composition data to calculate the relatedness of taxa in local communities. Various software tools are now available, bringing these kinds of analyses into reach for ecologists not previously familiar with phylogenetics.

These methods are really just modern updates of species-to-genera ratio (S/G ratio) analysis which has an important history in community ecology.

As a review, its significance lies in its exploration of the way different fields within biology are growing together again. Nineteenth-century natural history never separated concepts of ecology and evolution, but as genetic theory was incorporated into ideas of natural selection, and ecology developed its own body of mathematical theory about contemporary coexistence, the two fields grew apart.

Modern phylogenetic information offers a "glue" that is helping to blur the disciplinary boundaries of evolutionary biology, biogeography, and community ecology.

My doctoral work, with David Peart (Department of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth College) was on the species composition and dynamics of rain forest tree communities in Borneo, and was primarily concerned with contemporary processes potentially maintaining diversity.

While interested in the taxonomic structure of the communities, I didn’t have the insight or skills to attempt to reconstruct the phylogenetic relationships among taxa. I then started a postdoctoral fellowship with the Arnold Arboretum, and was based in the Harvard University Herbaria, a place that was buzzing with the excitement of new phylogenetic methods and results.

Peter F. Stevens (then Professor of Biology and Curator of the Arnold Arboretum and Gray Herbarium at Harvard University) had just tacked up a 15-foot printout of the new 3-gene tree of the angiosperms on the wall outside his office.

TreeBase was being developed by William H. Piel (now Associate Director of Evolutionary Bioinformatics at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University) and Michael Donoghue (now Yale Professor and Director of the Peabody Museum) in the office next door. TreeBASE stores phylogenetic trees and the data matrices used to generate them from published research papers.

Being immersed in this environment, it was natural to begin thinking more "phylogenetically," and to ask questions about phylogenetic patterns in local communities. The review itself grew out of several grant proposals to the National Science Foundation.

Apart from the social question of current trends in the interests of scientists, I would suggest that by highlighting the influence of historical processes on contemporary communities this review offers yet another call to consider the future implications of the changes we are wreaking on biological communities around the world.

Campbell O. Webb, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist
Harvard University
Arnold Arboretum (Jamaica Plain)
Boston, MA, USA

 

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•	www.treebase.org
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