Disturbed habitats locally reduce the signal of deep evolutionary history in functional traits of plants.

ABSTRACT: The functioning of present ecosystems reflects deep evolutionary history of locally cooccurring species if their functional traits show high phylogenetic signal (PS). However, we do not understand what drives local PS. We hypothesize that local PS is high in undisturbed and stressful habitats, either due to ongoing local assembly of species that maintained ancestral traits, or to past evolutionary maintenance of ancestral traits within habitat species-pools, or to both. We quantified PS and diversity of 10 traits within 6704 local plant communities across 38 Dutch habitat types differing in disturbance or stress. Mean local PS varied 50-fold among habitat types, often independently of phylogenetic or trait diversity. Mean local PS decreased with disturbance but showed no consistent relatio

SUBMITTER: Prinzing A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9292768 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature