title: The cladistic basis for the phylogenetic diversity (PD) measure links evolutionary features to environmental gradients and supports broad applications of microbial ecology's "phylogenetic beta diversity" framework.
abstract: The PD measure of phylogenetic diversity interprets branch lengths cladistically to make inferences about feature diversity. PD calculations extend conventional species-level ecological indices to the features level. The "phylogenetic beta diversity" framework developed by microbial ecologists calculates PD-dissimilarities between community localities. Interpretation of these PD-dissimilarities at the feature level explains the framework's success in producing ordinations revealing environmental gradients. An example gradients space using PD-dissimilarities illustrates how evolutionary features form unimodal response patterns to gradients. This features model supports new application of existing species-level methods that are robust to unimodal responses, plus novel applications relating to climate change, commercial products discovery, and community assembly.
authors.affiliation: The Australian Museum, 6 College St., Sydney, NSW, 2010, Australia.
authors.forename: Daniel P
authors.initials: DP
authors.lastname: Faith
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
authors.forename: Catherine A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Lozupone
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, NSW, 2109, Australia.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Nipperess
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
authors.forename: Rob
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Knight
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000145:classification*; D005075:Biological Evolution; D055669:Ecological and Environmental Phenomena; D008954:Models, Biological; D010802:Phylogeny