Biotic Mechanisms Strengthen Functional and Phylogenetic Convergence of Reef Fish Assemblages at Higher Latitudes
How communities of organisms come together has long fascinated scientists, with renewed interest in using functional and evolutionary patterns to infer mechanisms of community assembly. Ecological theory predicts that biotic interactions could lead to either divergence in the event of niche partitioning or convergence through the exclusion of competitively inferior species, but most macroecological studies attribute the latter to environmental influences. Here, we investigated the relative importance of these two opposing mechanisms across broad spatial gradients. We hypothesised stronger signals of: (i) convergence at high latitude owing to ecological generalism and (ii) divergence at low latitudes owing to specialisation.
Keywords: competitive exclusion, environmental filtering, functional diversity, latitudinal diversity gradient, limiting similarity, phylogenetic diversity
