Opposing effects of competitive exclusion on the phylogenetic structure of communities

Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 1085–1093 Abstract Though many processes are involved in determining which species coexist and assemble into communities, competition is among the best studied. One hypothesis about competition’s contribution to community assembly is that more closely related species are less likely to coexist. Though empirical evidence for this hypothesis is mixed, it remains a common assumption in certain phylogenetic approaches for...