Toby Pennington results 32
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Dispersal and in Situ Speciation as Contributors to Plant Diversity in the Chocó Region: Insights From Inga Mill. (Leguminosae)NARA Subscribed
Aim To investigate the historical processes underlying the assembly of the flora of the Chocó region, with a focus on the relative contributions of dispersal and in situ speciation. Using Inga (Leguminosae) as a model lineage, we evaluate the origin and diversification of species present in the Chocó. Location The Chocó region, a lowland rainforest located across southern Panama, the Pacific coast of Colombia, the Magdalena hu...
Aim We investigate the distribution of dispersal modes — endozoochory (via animal ingestion), synzoochory (via animal seed accumulation) and anemochory (via wind)—and seed mass of woody plants across Brazilian ecosystems, testing whether their relative abundance in local plant communities could be predicted by climate, edaphic factors and dispersal agents (e.g., the main vectors moving seeds). We expected climate to be the mai...
The Ecology of Encroachment: Identifying the Species and Plant Ecological Strategies Driving African Savanna Vegetation ChangeNARA Subscribed
Woody encroachment threatens African savanna and grassland biodiversity and ecosystem function. Prior studies have focused on the drivers and rates, yet encroacher ecology remains underexplored. We synthesized data across six dominant woody savanna genera ( Combretum, Dichrostachys, Prosopis, Senegalia, Terminalia and Vachellia ) to test whether encroachers represent a non‐random subset of species with life history strategies...
Knowledge gaps in legume diversity and distribution and prospects for future researchNARA Subscribed
Despite significant advancements in legume (Leguminosae or Fabaceae) taxonomy, biogeography and phylogenetics, substantial knowledge gaps persist, limiting our ability to understand their diversity, evolutionary history and conservation needs. In this study we used a robust taxonomic backbone and information housed in publicly available biodiversity repositories to quantify global knowledge gaps within the legume family, focus...
Geography and ecology shape the phylogenetic composition of Amazonian tree communitiesNARA Subscribed
Aim Amazonia hosts more tree species from numerous evolutionary lineages, both young and ancient, than any other biogeographic region. Previous studies have shown that tree lineages colonized multiple edaphic environments and dispersed widely across Amazonia, leading to a hypothesis, which we test, that lineages should not be strongly associated with either geographic regions or edaphic forest types. Location Amazonia. Taxon A...
Species diversity is crucial for promoting ecosystem resilience and stability. Species diversity promotes complementarity in resource use, resulting in a wider range of responses to adverse conditions. This enables populations of different species to fluctuate asynchronously, maintaining ecosystem functioning during extreme climatic events. However, incorporating such mechanisms into conservation decisions and ecosystem modell...
Aim Functional traits shape the distribution of taxa across environments. However, it remains unclear whether trait and environmental niche evolution are correlated, and what happened first: trait change facilitating environment shifts (pre‐adaptation) or environmental change leading to trait change (adaptation). We focus on a species‐rich Neotropical legume radiation to shed light on this enigma. Location Neotropics. Time Per...
Geographic patterns of tree dispersal modes in Amazonia and their ecological correlatesNARA Subscribed
Aim To investigate the geographic patterns and ecological correlates in the geographic distribution of the most common tree dispersal modes in Amazonia (endozoochory, synzoochory, anemochory and hydrochory). We examined if the proportional abundance of these dispersal modes could be explained by the availability of dispersal agents (disperser‐availability hypothesis) and/or the availability of resources for constructing zoocho...
Introgression across evolutionary scales suggests reticulation contributes to Amazonian tree diversityNARA Subscribed
Hybridization has the potential to generate or homogenize biodiversity and is a particularly common phenomenon in plants, with an estimated 25% of plant species undergoing interspecific gene flow. However, hybridization in Amazonia's megadiverse tree flora was assumed to be extremely rare despite extensive sympatry between closely related species, and its role in diversification remains enigmatic because it has not yet been ex...
Aim The aim was to test whether species distribution models (SDMs) can reproduce major macroecological patterns in a species‐rich, tropical region and provide recommendations for using SDMs in areas with sparse biotic inventory data. Location North‐east Brazil, including Minas Gerais. Time period Present. Major taxa studied Flowering plants. Methods Species composition estimates derived from stacked SDMs (s‐SDMs) were compared...
The global abundance of tree palmsNARA Subscribed
Aim Palms are an iconic, diverse and often abundant component of tropical ecosystems that provide many ecosystem services. Being monocots, tree palms are evolutionarily, morphologically and physiologically distinct from other trees, and these differences have important consequences for ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration and storage) and in terms of responses to climate change. We quantified global patterns of tree...
Aim To quantify evolutionary transitions between tropical evergreen rain forest and seasonally dry biomes, to test whether biome transitions affect lineage diversification and to examine the robustness of these results to methodological choices. Location The tropics. Time period The Cenozoic. Major taxa studied The plant subfamily Bombacoideae (Malvaceae). Methods We inferred ancestral biomes based on a fossil‐dated molecular...
Using tree species inventories to map biomes and assess their climatic overlaps in lowland tropical South AmericaNARA Subscribed
Aim To define and map the main biomes of lowland tropical South America (LTSA) using data from tree species inventories and to test the ability of climatic and edaphic variables to distinguish amongst them. Location Lowland Tropical South America (LTSA), including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. Time period Present. Major taxa studied Trees. Methods We compiled a database of 4,103 geo‐reference...
Geographical variation in the evolutionary diversity of tree communities across southern South AmericaNARA Subscribed
Aim To determine the principal drivers of variation in the evolutionary diversity of forest tree communities, with a focus on the temperate forests of South America. Location Forests across southern South America, extending from tropical forests in southern Brazil, to the temperate forests of southern Chile and Argentina. Methods We compiled a database of 742 forest tree community inventories spread over six countries and 12 b...
Dispersal, isolation and diversification with continued gene flow in an Andean tropical dry forestNARA Subscribed
The Andes are the world's longest mountain chain, and the tropical Andes are the world's richest biodiversity hot spot. The origin of the tropical Andean cordillera is relatively recent because the elevation of the mountains was relatively low (400–2500 m palaeoelevations) only 10 MYA with final uplift being rapid. These final phases of the Andean orogeny are thought to have had a fundamental role in shaping processes of bioti...
Environmental and historical controls of floristic composition across the South American Dry DiagonalNARA Subscribed
Aim The aim of this study was to test the role of environmental factors and spatially autocorrelated processes, such as historical fragmentation and dispersal limitation, in driving floristic variation across seasonally dry tropical forests ( SDTF s) in eastern South America. Location SDTF s extending from the Caatinga phytogeographical domain of north‐eastern Brazil to the Chaco phytogeographical domain of northern Argentina,...
Aim To examine the phylogeography of Ficus insipida subsp. insipida in order to investigate patterns of spatial genetic structure across the Neotropics and within Amazonia. Location Neotropics. Methods Plastid DNA ( trn H– psb A; 410 individuals from 54 populations) and nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer ( ITS ; 85 individuals from 27 populations) sequences were sampled from Mexico to Bolivia, representing the full...
The Amazon rain forest sustains the world's highest tree diversity, but it remains unclear why some clades of trees are hyperdiverse, whereas others are not. Using dated phylogenies, estimates of current species richness and trait and demographic data from a large network of forest plots, we show that fast demographic traits – short turnover times – are associated with high diversification rates across 51 clades of canopy tree...