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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2015

Selected Works

Animal Studies

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Climate And Species Richness Predict The Phylogenetic Structure Of African Mammal Communities, Jason Kamilar, Lydia Beaudrot, Kaye Reed Apr 2015

Climate And Species Richness Predict The Phylogenetic Structure Of African Mammal Communities, Jason Kamilar, Lydia Beaudrot, Kaye Reed

scholarworks@library.umass.edu

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 …