Phylogenetic patterns over sixty-five years of vegetation change across a montane elevation gradient

Abstract Phylogenetic diversity is an important axis of biodiversity associated with ecosystem stability and productivity. However, climate change will threaten phylogenetic diversity when extinctions are phylogenetically clustered. Despite the importance of phylogenetic diversity for current and future ecosystems, and the potential unique insights it offers into communities, few studies have quantified its long-term changes. Here, we leverage a dataset spanning approximately 65 years and 1500 m of elevation in the Colorado Rocky Mountains to test for changes in phylogenetic diversity in angiosperm communities. We included four community types (sagebrush, spruce-fir, upland-herb, alpine), which vary in the direction and magnitude of changes in species richness over this period. We tested whether individual species’ responses to climate change could be predicted by phylogeny, including changes to abundance, constancy (% of sites occupied), and elevational range. We did not find phylogenetic signal in abundance change in any community, but we did find phylogenetic signal in both constancy shifts in alpine and elevational shifts in sagebrush communities. We then tested for changes in phylogenetic diversity across time for each community type. We found that phylogenetic diversity changed in the same direction as species richness in the sagebrush community, where both declined, and in the upland-herb, where both increased, with important roles for both species gains and losses in community phylogenetic composition. The alpine community did not change in phylogenetic diversity, although richness declined, while the spruce-fir community increased in phylogenetic diversity but did not change in richness, emphasizing the potential for changes in different aspects of diversity to be decoupled. Our work highlights that the impacts of climate change vary across communities, and that phylogeny is shaping changes in certain systems. Given the importance of phylogenetic diversity to ecosystem function, long term studies are essential for understanding how climate change impacts phylogenetic diversity in distinct community types with unique responses to climate change.