Marc W. Cadotte and T. Jonathan Davies
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691157689
- eISBN:
- 9781400881192
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691157689.001.0001
- Subject:
- Biology, Ecology
This is the first book to critically review the application of phylogenetic methods in ecology, and it serves as a primer to working ecologists and students of ecology wishing to understand these ...
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This is the first book to critically review the application of phylogenetic methods in ecology, and it serves as a primer to working ecologists and students of ecology wishing to understand these methods. The book demonstrates how phylogenetic information is transforming ecology by offering fresh ways to estimate the similarities and differences among species, and by providing deeper, evolutionary-based insights on species distributions, coexistence, and niche partitioning. It examines this emerging area's explosive growth, allowing for this new body of hypotheses testing. It systematically looks at all the main areas of current ecophylogenetic methodology, testing, and inference. Each chapter covers a unique topic, emphasizes key assumptions, and introduces the appropriate statistical methods and null models required for testing phylogenetically informed hypotheses. The applications presented throughout are supported and connected by examples relying on real-world data that have been analyzed using the open-source programming language, R. Showing how phylogenetic methods are shedding light on fundamental ecological questions related to species coexistence, conservation, and global change, the book will interest anyone who thinks that evolution might be important in their data.Less
This is the first book to critically review the application of phylogenetic methods in ecology, and it serves as a primer to working ecologists and students of ecology wishing to understand these methods. The book demonstrates how phylogenetic information is transforming ecology by offering fresh ways to estimate the similarities and differences among species, and by providing deeper, evolutionary-based insights on species distributions, coexistence, and niche partitioning. It examines this emerging area's explosive growth, allowing for this new body of hypotheses testing. It systematically looks at all the main areas of current ecophylogenetic methodology, testing, and inference. Each chapter covers a unique topic, emphasizes key assumptions, and introduces the appropriate statistical methods and null models required for testing phylogenetically informed hypotheses. The applications presented throughout are supported and connected by examples relying on real-world data that have been analyzed using the open-source programming language, R. Showing how phylogenetic methods are shedding light on fundamental ecological questions related to species coexistence, conservation, and global change, the book will interest anyone who thinks that evolution might be important in their data.
