New paper by Saladin et al. on “Environment and evolutionary history shape phylogenetic turnover in European tetrapods” published in Nature Comm.
Abstract: Phylogenetic turnover quantifies the evolutionary distance among species assemblages and iscentral to understanding the main drivers shaping biodiversity. It is affected both by geo-graphic and environmental distance between sites. Therefore, analyzing phylogenetic turn-over in environmental space requires removing the effect of geographic distance. Here, weapply a novel approach by deciphering phylogenetic turnover of European tetrapods inenvironmental space after removing geographic land distance effects. We demonstrate thatphylogenetic turnover is strongly structured in environmental space, particularly in ecto-thermic tetrapods, and is well explained by macroecological characteristics such as nichesize, species richness and relative phylogenetic diversity. In ectotherms, rather recent evo-lutionary processes were important in structuring phylogenetic turnover along environmentalgradients. In contrast, early evolutionary processes had already shaped the current structureof phylogenetic turnover in endotherms. Our approach enables the disentangling of theidiosyncrasies of evolutionary processes such as the degree of niche conservatism anddiversification rates in structuring biodiversity.