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We have little knowledge of how climatic variation (and by proxy, habitat variation) influences

the phylogenetic structure of tropical communities. Here, we quantified the phylogenetic

structure of mammal communities in Africa to investigate how community structure

varies with respect to climate and species richness variation across the continent. In addition,

we investigated how phylogenetic patterns vary across carnivores, primates, and ungulates.

We predicted that climate would differentially affect the structure of communities

from different clades due to between-clade biological variation. We examined 203 communities

using two metrics, the net relatedness (NRI) and nearest taxon (NTI) indices. We

used simultaneous autoregressive …

Background:

Numerous researchers have posited that there should be a strong negative relationship between the

evolutionary distance among species and their ecological similarity. Alternative evidence suggests that members of adaptive radiations should display no relationship between divergence time and ecological similarity because rapid evolution results in near-simultaneous speciation early in the clade’s history. In this paper, we performed the first

investigation of ecological diversity in a phylogenetic context using a mammalian adaptive radiation, the Malagasy

primates.

Methodology/Principal Findings:

We collected data for 43 extant species including: 1) 1064 species by locality samples, 2) GIS climate data for each sampling locality, …