ArticlePlant diversity2021
Are phylogenies resolved at the genus level appropriate for studies on phylogenetic structure of species assemblages?
Article in Plant diversity, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed, 134 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Alpine treeline ecotones world wide: fine-scale spatial patterns and environmental controls.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Dental Calculus Formation Is Linked to Diet and Phylogeny in Mammals.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Scale-dependent decoupling of leaf traits and phylogeny reveals dimension-specific environmental filtering in Polyspora chrysandra-associated montane forests.BMC plant biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Species invasion and phylogenetic relatedness of vascular plants on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the roof of the world.Plant diversity · 2025Article
- Inversion of the latitudinal diversity gradient at high taxonomic level in liverworts revealed by a phylogenetically deconstructive approach.Annals of botany · 2025Article
- Phylogenetically close alien Asteraceae species with minimal niche overlap are more likely to invade.Plant diversity · 2025Article
- Keys to the global treeline formation: Thermal limit for its position and moisture for the taxon-specific variation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Ecological succession of fishes in a large Amazonian off river reservoir.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Phylogenetic diversity sheds light on the evolution of the unique fern flora of Mount Kinabalu, Borneo.Annals of botany · 2025Article
- Using Plant DNA Barcodes and Functional Traits to Assess Community Assembly ofEcology and evolution · 2025Article
- Seed functional ecology in Brazilian rock outcrop vegetation: an integrative synthesis.Annals of botany · 2025Article
- Environmental filtering, not dispersal history, explains global patterns of phylogenetic turnover in seed plants at deep evolutionary timescales.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Geology and climate drive alpine plant compositional variation among peaks in the Cascade Range of Washington.PloS one · 2025Article
- Geographic patterns and ecological causes of phylogenetic structure in mosses along an elevational gradient in the central Himalaya.Plant diversity · 2025Article
- Global patterns of taxonomic and phylogenetic endemism in liverwort assemblages.Plant diversity · 2025Article
- Spatial patterns and climatic drivers of phylogenetic structure of regional liverwort assemblages in China.Annals of botany · 2024Article
- Global biogeographic regions for ants have complex relationships with those for plants and tetrapods.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Landform and lithospheric development contribute to the assembly of mountain floras in China.Nature communications · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Phylogenies are essential to studies investigating the effect of evolutionary history on assembly of species in ecological communities and geographical and ecological patterns of phylogenetic structure of species assemblages. Because phylogenies well resolved at the species level are lacking for many major groups of organisms such as vascular plants, researchers often generate a species-level phylogenies using a phylogeny well resolved at the genus level as a backbone and attaching species to their respective genera in the phylogeny as polytomies or by using a megaphylogeny well resolved at the genus level as a backbone and adding additional species to the megaphylogeny as polytomies of their respective genera. However, whether the result of a study using species-level phylogenies generated in these ways is robust, compared to that based on phylogenies fully resolved at the species level, has not been assessed. Here, we use 1093 angiosperm tree assemblages (each in a 110 × 110 km quadrat) in North America as a model system to address this question, by examining six commonly used metrics of phylogenetic structure (phylogenetic diversity and phylogenetic relatedness) and six climate variables commonly used in ecology. Our results showed that (1) the scores of phylogenetic metrics derived from species-level phylogenies resolved at the genus level with species being attached to their respective genera as polytomies are very strongly or perfectly correlated to those derived from a phylogeny fully resolved at the species level (the mean of correlation coefficients is 0.973), and (2) the relationships between the scores of phylogenetic metrics and climate variables are consistent between the two sets of analyses based on the two types of phylogeny. Our study suggests that using species-level phylogenies resolved at the genus level with species being attached to their genera as polytomies is appropriate in studies exploring patterns of phylogenetic structure of species in ecological communities across geographical and ecological gradients.
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