Although multiple types of diversity are now recognized, studies of relationships among drivers of diversity and consequences that incorporate multiple dimensions are uncommon, especially from a global perspective. We built on previous work that used a global tropical forest dataset to explore how functional and taxonomic diversity influence carbon storage by also calculating measures of phylogenetic diversity for these areas. The study relied on data from the TEAM Network, a global network of tropical forest monitoring sites designed to understand the effects of climate change and land use on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Using recent data from 11 sites located in Asia, Africa and America, we built a phylogenetic tree containing all the genera present in the sites. We then calculated multiple measures of phylogenetic diversity for each site, considered independence among these measures and other measures of diversity, analyzed relationships between phylogenetic diversity and environmental variables, and finally considered the ability of single and combined diversity metrics to predict carbon storage.
Results/Conclusions
Phylogenetic diversity varied greatly across sites and continents. In general, we found that phylogenetic diversity was negatively impacted by elevation across sites but increased with evapotranspiration. Carbon storage also increased with phylogenetic diversity, potentially indicating the role of niche partitioning in driving carbon storage. Although phylogenetic diversity was highly correlated with taxonomic indices, analyses of multiple models indicated that carbon storage is best predicted by models that couple functional diversity metrics with phylogenetic data, not taxonomic information. Our results suggest that phylogenetic history may play a key role in explaining relationships between diversity and ecosystem services and thus be important to predicting the value of communities. Our analyses also highlight methods by which phylogenetic information may be rapidly assessed.