1. Co-fruiting plant species are subject to a variety of biotic and abiotic processes that may influence patterns of fruiting phenology and the functional and phylogenetic diversity of co-fruiting taxa in a community. Understanding the seasonal patterns of functional and phylogenetic diversity of fruiting in a community will shed new light on potential mechanisms structuring plant communities. ...

Dated or calibrated phylogenetic trees, in which branch lengths correspond to evolutionary divergence times between nodes, are important requirements for computing measures of phylogenetic diversity or phylogenetic community structure. The increasing knowledge about the diversification and evolutionary divergence times of vascular plants requires a revision of the age estimates used for the cal...

The approximately 356 species of testudines (turtles) are remarkable for their blend phylogenetic conservatism and diversity [...]

Old, climate-buffered infertile landscapes (Ocbils) have attracted increasing levels of interest in recent years because of their exceptionally diverse plant communities. Brazil's campos rupestres (rupestrian grasslands) are home to almost 15% of Brazil's native flora in less than 0.8% of Brazil's territory: an ideal study system for exploring variation in floristic diversity and phylogenetic s...

Human activities have altered the composition of biotas through two fundamental processes: native extinctions and alien introductions. Both processes affect the taxonomic (i.e., species identity) and phylogenetic (i.e., species evolutionary history) structure of species assemblages. However, it is not known what the relative magnitude of these effects is at large spatial scales. Here we analyze...

Forest genetic sustainability is an important component of forest health because genetic diversity and evolutionary processes allow for the adaptation of species and for the maintenance of ecosystem functionality and resilience. Phylogenetic community analyses, a set of new statistical methods for describing the evolutionary relationships among species, offer an innovative approach for assessin...

Microbial ecology is the study of microbes in the natural environment and their interactions with each other. Investigating the nature of microorganisms residing within a specific habitat is an extremely important component of microbial ecology. Such microbial diversity surveys aim to determine the identity, physiological preferences, metabolic capabilities, and genomic features of microbial ta...