Spatial patterns and climatic drivers of phylogenetic structure of regional liverwort assemblages in China

Background and aims: Latitudinal diversity gradients have been intimately linked to the tropical niche conservatism hypothesis, which posits that there has been a strong filter due to the challenges faced by ancestral tropical lineages to adapt to low temperatures and colonize extra-tropical regions. In liverworts, species richness is higher towards the tropics, but the centres of diversity of the basal lineages are distributed across extra-tropical regions, pointing to the colonization of tropical regions by phylogenetically clustered assemblages of species of temperate origin. Here, we test this hypothesis through analyses of the relationship between macroclimatic variation and phylogenetic diversity in Chinese liverworts.

Methods: Phylogenetic diversity metrics and their standardized effect sizes for liverworts in each of the 28 regional floras at the province level in China were related to latitude and six climate variables using regression analysis. We conducted variation partitioning analyses to determine the relative importance of each group of climatic variables.

Key results: We find that the number of species decreases with latitude, whereas phylogenetic diversity shows the reverse pattern, and that phylogenetic diversity is more strongly correlated with temperature-related variables compared with precipitation-related variables.

Conclusions: We interpret the opposite patterns observed in phylogenetic diversity and species richness in terms of a more recent origin of tropical diversity coupled with higher extinctions in temperate regions.