title: The phylogenetic signal of species co-occurrence in high-diversity shrublands: different patterns for fire-killed and fire-resistant species.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Using phylogenies in community ecology is now commonplace, but typically, studies assume and test for a single common phylogenetic signal for all species in a community, at a given scale. A possibility that remains little-explored is that species differing in demographic or ecological attributes, or facing different selective pressures, show different community phylogenetic patterns, even within the same communities. Here I compare community phylogenetic patterns for fire-killed and fire-resistant Banksia species in the fire-prone shrublands of southwest Australia.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Using new Bayesian phylogenies of Banksia, together with ecological trait data and abundance data from 24 field sites, I find that fire regeneration mode influences the phylogenetic and phenotypic signal of species co-occurrence patterns. Fire-killed species (reseeders) show patterns of phylogenetic and phenotypic repulsion consistent with competition-driven niche differentiation, but there are no such patterns for fire-resistant species (resprouters). For pairs of species that differ in fire response, co-occurrence is mediated by environmental filtering based on similarity in edaphic preferences.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These results suggest that it may be simplistic to characterize an entire community by a single structuring process, such as competition or environmental filtering. For this reason, community analyses based on pairwise species co-occurrence patterns may be more informative than those based on whole-community structure metrics.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Macroevolution and Macroecology, Research School of Biology, Australian National University, Canberra, A.C.T. 0200, Australia. marcel.cardillo@anu.edu.au
authors.forename: Marcel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cardillo
mesh_terms: D001315:Australia; D044822:Biodiversity; D017753:Ecosystem; D005390:Fires; D010802:Phylogeny; D039105:Proteaceae / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics / Q000502:physiology