Recovery of phylogenetic diversity and phylogenetic structure in trees and animals along a chronosequence of tropical forest regeneration

Sebastián Escobar, Juan Ernesto Guevara-Andino, Nico Blüthgen, Gunnar Brehm, Santiago F. Burneo, Ugo Diniz, David A. Donoso, Santiago Erazo, Heike Feldhaar, Nina Grella, Alexander Keller, Anna R. Landim, Sara D. Leonhardt, Diego Marín Armijos, Jörg Müller, Karla Neira Salamea, Eike Lena Neuschulz, Felicity L. Newell, Karen M. Pedersen, Mark-Oliver Rödel, Matthias Schleuning, Marco Tschapka, María-José Endara

Tropical forests are highly threatened habitats with the capacity to recover after disturbance. Integrating phylogenies in the study of forest recovery provides key information on the evolutionary relationships of communities through succession, and also serves as a proxy of their functional trait diversity and resilience capacity. We used phylogenetic and community data for trees and animal groups to study the recovery of phylogenetic diversity (PD) and phylogenetic structure along a chronosequence of forest regeneration in the Ecuadorian Chocó. Phylogenetic diversity recovered with regeneration time, and it occurred after species richness for five out of eight studied groups. Only two groups showed increasing phylogenetic overdispersion, while three groups tended to clustering, and three more showed random structure. Phylogenetic clustering potentially occurred mainly because of environmental filtering during early and late regeneration, while phylogenetic overdispersion occurred because of biotic factors potentially related to competition and dispersal capacity. Our results show the complex nature of succession in tropical forests, making it difficult to raise generalizations about the trajectory of PD and phylogenetic structure after disturbance. However, they also show that PD can recover relatively rapidly under natural forest regeneration, suggesting that the studied communities are resilient to disturbance from an evolutionary perspective.