DOI: 10.5061/dryad.d87v7
title: Data from: Environmental gradients and the evolution of successional habitat specialization: a test case with 14 Neotropical forest sites

description: 1. Successional gradients are ubiquitous in nature, yet few studies have
 systematically examined the evolutionary origins of taxa that specialize
 at different successional stages. Here we quantify successional habitat
 specialization in Neotropical forest trees and evaluate its evolutionary
 lability along a precipitation gradient. Theoretically, successional
 habitat specialization should be more evolutionarily conserved in wet
 forests than in dry forests due to more extreme microenvironmental
 differentiation between early and late successional stages in wet forest.
 2. We applied a robust multinomial classification model to samples of
 primary and secondary forest trees from 14 Neotropical lowland forest
 sites spanning a precipitation gradient from 788 to 4000 mm annual
 rainfall, identifying species that are old growth specialists and
 secondary forest specialists in each site. We constructed phylogenies for
 the classified taxa at each site and for the entire set of classified
 taxa, and tested whether successional habitat specialization is
 phylogenetically conserved. We further investigated differences in the
 functional traits of species specializing in secondary vs. old-growth
 forest along the precipitation gradient, expecting different trait
 associations with secondary forest specialists in wet vs. dry forests
 since water availability is more limiting in dry forests and light
 availability more limiting in wet forests. 3. Successional habitat
 specialization is non-randomly distributed in the angiosperm phylogeny,
 with a tendency towards phylogenetic conservatism overall and a trend
 toward stronger conservatism in wet forests than in dry forests. However,
 the specialists come from all the major branches of the angiosperm
 phylogeny, and very few functional traits showed any consistent
 relationships with successional habitat specialization in either wet or
 dry forests. 4. Synthesis: The niche conservatism evident in the habitat
 specialization of Neotropical trees suggests a role for radiation into
 different successional habitats in the evolution of species-rich genera,
 though the diversity of functional traits that lead to success in
 different successional habitats complicates analyses at the community
 scale. Examining the distribution of particular lineages with respect to
 successional gradients may provide more insight into the role of
 successional habitat specialization in the evolution of species-rich taxa.
description: R script for calculating
 Dcalculates Fritz &
 Purvis's D for successional habitat specialization at each site and
 for the entire phylogeny used in this studyDcalc.rR script for brunch/crunch analysiscalculates brunch/crunch as appropriate for functional trait data with respect to successional habitat specializationbrunchncrunch.rPhylogenyThis file contains a supertree of all the taxa at all sites that were used in the analysis presented in Letcher et al. 2015; site-specific phylogenies can be generated by taking subsets of this tree.TREE_Mar12_bladj.newSpecies abundancesContains the number of individuals in old-growth and secondary forest for each species at each site.taxa.csvFunctional trait dataFunctional trait datatraits.csvSite locationsLatitude and longitude of sites used in this study.sitelocs.csv