Tropical forests are highly threatened habitats with the capacity to recover after disturbance. We studied the recovery of phylogenetic diversity (PD) and phylogenetic community structure in plants and animals along a chronosequence of regeneration. We tested expected phylogenetic patterns through succession, including a slower recovery of PD compared with species richness (SR), increasing phylogenetic overdispersion with regeneration time, and the role of environmental filtering and landscape in promoting phylogenetic clustering and overdispersion. PD recovery occurred after SR for only four out of eight groups. Frugivorous and invertivorous birds showed increasing phylogenetic overdispersion during succession, while frogs, bees and trees instead showed a tendency for increasing phylogenetic clustering. Phylogenetic clustering was mainly related to environmental factors during early and late regeneration. Phylogenetic overdispersion during late regeneration was driven by the distance to old-growth forests only in frugivorous birds. Our results show the complex nature of succession in tropical forests, reflecting idiosyncratic patterns of PD and phylogenetic community structure recovery after disturbance for plants and animals. However, they also show that PD can recover relatively rapidly under natural regeneration, suggesting that the studied communities are resilient to disturbance from an evolutionary perspective.
Escobar et al. (Thu,) studied this question.