Effects of phylogeny on coexistence in model communities

A species9 traits influence the way in which it interacts with the environment. Thus, we expect traits to play a role in determining whether a given set of species coexists. Traits are, in turn, the outcome of an eco-evolutionary process summarized by a phylogenetic tree. Therefore, the phylogenetic tree associated with a set of species should encode information about the assembly properties of the community. Many studies have highlighted the potentially complex ways in which phylogenetic information is translated into species9 ecological properties. However, much less emphasis has been placed on developing expectations for community properties under a particular hypothesis. In this work, we couple a simple model of trait evolution on a phylogenetic tree with local community dynamics governed by Lotka-Volterra equations. This allows us to derive properties of the community of coexisting species as a function of the number of traits, tree topology and the size of the species pool. Our results highlight how phylogenies and traits, in concert, affect the coexistence of a set of species. In this way, our work provides new baseline expectations for the ways in which phylogenetic information is reflected in the structure of and coexistence within local communities.