TY - JOUR T1 - Can functional traits explain phylogenetic signal in the composition of a plant community? JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/032938 SP - 032938 AU - Daijiang Li AU - Anthoy R. Ives AU - Donald M. Waller Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/12/19/032938.abstract N2 - Phylogeny-based and functional trait-based analyses are used widely to study community composition. In principle, knowing all information about species traits should completely explain phylogenetic patterns in community composition. In reality, phylogenies may contain more information than the collection of measured traits. The extent to which functional trait information makes phylogenetic information redundant, however, is unknown. We used phylogenetic linear mixed models to analyze community composition of 55 understory plant species distributed across 30 forest sites in central Wisconsin. These communities showed strong phylogenetic attraction. Most of the 15 measured functional traits showed strong phylogenetic signal, but they only reduced the strength of phylogenetic community patterns in the abundances and presence/absences of co-occurring species by 57% and 89%, respectively, falling short of fully explaining phylogenetic community structure. Our study demonstrates the value of phylogenies in studying of community composition, especially with abundance data, even when rich functional trait data are available. ER -