Using phylocom to answer questions about community assembly
Jean H. Burns and Sharon Y. Strauss Center for Population Biology
Community assembly
Terrestrial plants
Inquiline communities in pitcher plants
Marine sponges
Cattle tanks
Phylogeny in community assembly
Underdispersed/Clumped A B A B C D Habitat filtering Overdispersed/Even A C A B C D Competition
Measures of Community Phylogenetic Structure
Vamosi et al. 2009
Options for analysis for community phylogenetic dispersion patterns
Phylocom R packages: picante, (ape, vegan) Matlab code
Technical stuff to think about
Effects of polytomies (Swenson 2009) Effects of branch length (Holzman et al. in prep.) Size of community relative to regional pool (Kraft et al. 2007) Method of phylogeny estimation (e.g. phylomatic for angiosperms)
File structure
NO extra hard returns
They will be read as empty species or samples
newick phylogeny tabs must line up in text file
Start phylocom
cd /Users/Jean/Desktop/phylocom-4.1 Run the community phylogenetic dispersion command ./phylocom comstruct > results.xls
Null model 2: species randomized with respect to the phylogeny pool
Interpreting the output
NRI = Net Relatedness Index
+ = underdispersed/clumped - = overdispersed/even
Calculate p-value:
p = (MPD.rankHi/1000) Make sure that the # of counts in .rankHi + .rankLow ~ number of runs (If not there are many ties. Interpret with caution.)
Null model 0, phylogeny shuffle
figure from Hardy 2008
null model 0
Maintains local species diversity per site Maintains among site abundance distribution per species Maintains spatial autocorrelation of local abundances per species
Null model 1: Species in sample are random draws from sample pool
null model 1
Maintains local species diversity per site
Null model 2: species are a random draw from the phylogeny pool
null model 2
Maintains species diversity per site reduces to null model 1 if the species in the phylogeny pool = the species in the sample pool This is the Default model
Null model 3: Independent shuffle/ Checkerboard
Independent swap
constrains swapped matrix to have same row and col totals as sample matrix preserves species richness per site and # sites in which each species occurs very time consuming
Try using a different null model and comparing results
./phylocom comstruct -m 0 -r 999 > results.xls
Incorporate abundance
./phylocom comstruct -m 0 -a > results.xls Open the resulting text file in excel.
Abundance evenness or clumping
Regional Pool A 10 B 10 C 10 D 10 A C A A C C B A A B A C B Even Clumped
Calculate the distance from each species to its nearest native neighbor
./phylocom icomdist > results.xls
Determine the position of phylogenetic clumping or evenness in a community sample
./phylocom nodesig > results.nex Open the resulting nexus file in mesquite.
At what nodes is there significant clumping/evenness?
*(5): SIGMORE *(12): SIGMORE *(4): SIGMORE *(3): SIGMORE *(34): SIGLESS
Interpretation in light of trait evolution/dispersion
from Webb et al. 2002
Comtrait calculates the trait dispersion within a file and compares to a null model
./phylocom comtrait -m 0 -r 999 -x 1 > results.xls The trait B in clump2b has a SESMetric of 2.83, which is significantly lower than expected by chance (p < 0.0001) -underdispersed/clumped. The trait is thus interpreted as conserved.
Trait B is conserved at clump 1
from Webb et al. 2002