Phylogenetic Distance vs Latent Traits - vvandermeersch/climategrowthshifts GitHub Wiki

Kunstler, G., Lavergne, S., Courbaud, B., Thuiller, W., Vieilledent, G., Zimmermann, N.E., Kattge, J. and Coomes, D.A., 2012. Competitive interactions between forest trees are driven by species' trait hierarchy, not phylogenetic or functional similarity: implications for forest community assembly. Ecology Letters, 15(8), pp.831-840.

• This work fundamentally redefines the drivers of interspecies competition in forest tree communities. It rejects the prevailing "similarity hypothesis," which suggests that competition is strongest between functionally or phylogenetically similar species. Instead, the study provides robust evidence that competitive interaction strengths are predominantly driven by the hierarchical distance of species' functional traits, particularly Leaf Mass per Area (LMA) and Wood Density (WD). This implies that the observed functional and phylogenetic convergence in local tree communities might be a result of competition selecting for species with superior competitive abilities, rather than solely environmental filtering.

Letten, A.D. and Cornwell, W.K., 2015. Trees, branches and (square) roots: why evolutionary relatedness is not linearly related to functional distance. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 6(4), pp.439-444.

• When using evolutionary relatedness (phylogenetic distance) as an approximation for functional trait dissimilarity in community ecology, it's commonly and implicitly assumed that functional differences scale linearly with evolutionary time. However, this paper highlights that under a classic Brownian motion model of trait evolution, the expected functional distance (trait dissimilarity) between two taxa increases linearly with the square root of evolutionary time, rather than with time itself.
• Implications & Solution: The conventional linear approach significantly overweights deep evolutionary history and underweights recent evolution, reducing statistical power to detect relationships between evolutionary history and contemporary ecological processes. The proposed simple solution is to apply a square root transformation to the phylogenetic distance matrix. This adjustment aligns phylogenetic distance with the expected trait dissimilarity under Brownian motion, dramatically increasing statistical power (e.g., improving 92% of trials in simulations) and providing a more accurate connection between evolutionary relatedness and ecological patterns.