title: Assembly of forest communities across East Asia--insights from phylogenetic community structure and species pool scaling.
abstract: Local communities are assembled from larger-scale species pools via dispersal, environmental filtering, biotic interactions, and local stochastic demographic processes. The relative importance, scaling and interplay of these assembly processes can be elucidated by comparing local communities to variously circumscribed species pools. Here we present the first study applying this approach to forest tree communities across East Asia, focusing on community phylogenetic structure and using data from a global network of tropical, subtropical and temperate forest plots. We found that Net Relatedness Index (NRI) and Nearest Taxon Index (NTI) values were generally lower with geographically broad species pools (global and Asian species pools) than with an East Asian species pool, except that global species pool produced higher NTI than the East Asian species pool. The lower NRI for the global relative to the East Asian species pool may indicate an important role of intercontinental migration during the Neogene and Quaternary and climatic conservatism in shaping the deeper phylogenetic structure of tree communities in East Asia. In contrast, higher NTI for the global relative to the East Asian species pool is consistent with recent localized diversification determining the shallow phylogenetic structure.
authors: Section for Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Ny Munkegade 114, DK-8000 Aarhus CDenmark.
authors: Gang
authors: G
authors: Feng
authors: State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.
authors: Xiangcheng
authors: X
authors: Mi
authors: 1] Section for Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Ny Munkegade 114, DK-8000 Aarhus CDenmark [2] Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, TW9 3AB Richmond, Surrey, UK.
authors: Wolf L
authors: WL
authors: Eiserhardt
authors: Center for Ecological Research, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin.
authors: Guangze
authors: G
authors: Jin
authors: State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.
authors: Weiguo
authors: W
authors: Sang
authors: Key Laboratory of Aquatic Botany and Watershed Ecology, Wuhan Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan.
authors: Zhijun
authors: Z
authors: Lu
authors: Tiantong National Field Observation Station for Forest Ecosystem, East China Normal University, Shanghai.
authors: Xihua
authors: X
authors: Wang
authors: Guangxi Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guilin.
authors: Xiankun
authors: X
authors: Li
authors: State Key Lab of Biological Control and School of Life Sciences, Guangdong Key Lab of Plant Resources, SYSU-Alberta Joint Lab for Biodiversity Conservation, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou.
authors: Buhang
authors: B
authors: Li
authors: Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, National Dong Hwa University, Hualein.
authors: Ifang
authors: I
authors: Sun
authors: State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.
authors: Keping
authors: K
authors: Ma
authors: Section for Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Ny Munkegade 114, DK-8000 Aarhus CDenmark.
authors: Jens-Christian
authors: JC
authors: Svenning
mesh_terms: D001208:Asia; D044822:Biodiversity; D065928:Forests; D010802:Phylogeny; D063148:Plant Dispersal / Q000502:physiology*; D013269:Stochastic Processes; D014197:Trees / Q000145:classification / Q000502:physiology*; D014329:Tropical Climate