The lowland Amazon rainforest houses some of the greatest tree diversity on Earth. While the vast majority of these species are rare, a small number are common and widespread and thus considered to play a disproportionate role in many of the global ecosystem services provided by the Amazon. However, the extent to which dominant Amazonian tree species actually include multiple clades, each on their own unique evolutionary traje...

Aim We documented patterns of phylogenetic diversity (PD) and phylogenetic endemism (PE) in the moss flora of North America, determined how environmental variables explain these patterns, compared the patterns in mosses to known patterns in angiosperms and explored how patterns driven by sub‐clades might conflict with patterns driven by other sub‐clades. Location North America north of Mexico. Taxon Mosses (Bryophyta). Methods...

Soil heterogeneity is an important driver of divergent natural selection in plants. Neotropical forests have the highest tree diversity on earth, and frequently, soil specialist congeners are distributed parapatrically. While the role of edaphic heterogeneity in the origin and maintenance of tropical tree diversity is unknown, it has been posited that natural selection across the patchwork of soils in the Amazon rainforest is...

Aim Edaphic heterogeneity may be an important driver of population differentiation in the Amazon but remains to be investigated in trees. We compared the phylogeographic structure across the geographic distribution of two Protium (Burseraceae) species with different degrees of edaphic specialization: Protium alvarezianum , an edaphic specialist of white‐sand habitat islands; and Protium subserratum , an edaphic generalist foun...