Floristic plant geography is a discipline which examines the present and past distribution and composition of all plants in a certain area or a country, the origin and evolution of plants on the basis of geological hi...Floristic plant geography is a discipline which examines the present and past distribution and composition of all plants in a certain area or a country, the origin and evolution of plants on the basis of geological history, especially some important events, e.g. movements of plates, changes between sea and continents, glacier history and emergence of mountains, and its impact on the flora. As a subject, flodstic pant geography is based on展开更多
Aims The last decade has seen many plant ecologists integrating phylogenetic analysis into ecology to explain patterns of species cooccurrence and compositional similarity across assemblages.Despite the advances in th...Aims The last decade has seen many plant ecologists integrating phylogenetic analysis into ecology to explain patterns of species cooccurrence and compositional similarity across assemblages.Despite the advances in this area,there are still some challenges that need to be addressed.One challenge is that most of the phylogenetic studies of plant assemblages have focused only on a small proportion of all of the vascular plants that co-occur(e.g.woody plants),while much of the remaining co-occurring flora has been ignored.Methods Here we introduce an analytical approach that we term phylofloristics that analyzes the compositional similarity of floras in relation to spatial and environmental gradients to understand their assembly.As an illustration,we assembled a large phylogenetic tree for the flora of the Lesser Antilles and evaluated the patterns of floristic and phylofloristic similarity among the island-specific floras.We analyzed the relationship of these similarities with spatial and environmental distance and compared the results for non-endemic and endemic lineages.Important Findings The results show a major influence of environmental heterogeneity on the assembly of island floras and far less evidence for the importance of dispersal limitation of lineages and species.This study highlights the importance of incorporating broader taxonomic sampling to improve our understanding of assembly processes in ecology.We expect future phylofloristic studies will improve the approach we have taken by generating more refined phylogenetic trees and by incorporating phylogeographic information.展开更多
文摘Floristic plant geography is a discipline which examines the present and past distribution and composition of all plants in a certain area or a country, the origin and evolution of plants on the basis of geological history, especially some important events, e.g. movements of plates, changes between sea and continents, glacier history and emergence of mountains, and its impact on the flora. As a subject, flodstic pant geography is based on
文摘Aims The last decade has seen many plant ecologists integrating phylogenetic analysis into ecology to explain patterns of species cooccurrence and compositional similarity across assemblages.Despite the advances in this area,there are still some challenges that need to be addressed.One challenge is that most of the phylogenetic studies of plant assemblages have focused only on a small proportion of all of the vascular plants that co-occur(e.g.woody plants),while much of the remaining co-occurring flora has been ignored.Methods Here we introduce an analytical approach that we term phylofloristics that analyzes the compositional similarity of floras in relation to spatial and environmental gradients to understand their assembly.As an illustration,we assembled a large phylogenetic tree for the flora of the Lesser Antilles and evaluated the patterns of floristic and phylofloristic similarity among the island-specific floras.We analyzed the relationship of these similarities with spatial and environmental distance and compared the results for non-endemic and endemic lineages.Important Findings The results show a major influence of environmental heterogeneity on the assembly of island floras and far less evidence for the importance of dispersal limitation of lineages and species.This study highlights the importance of incorporating broader taxonomic sampling to improve our understanding of assembly processes in ecology.We expect future phylofloristic studies will improve the approach we have taken by generating more refined phylogenetic trees and by incorporating phylogeographic information.
