Abstract
Ecologists and conservation biologists are increasingly focusing on quantifying the phylogenetic component of biodiversity in order to inform basic and applied research. A major obstacle of this approach in tropical ecosystems has been the difficulty of generating high-quality phylogenetic trees for the vast numbers of species in these systems. Phylogenetic trees inferred from DNA barcodes hold the potential to overcome this obstacle. Here, I present a methodological framework for analyzing the phylogenetic alpha and beta diversity of ecological communities using a phylogenetic tree. The analytical approach is presented using the freely available and widely used software platform “R”.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank John Kress and Dave Erickson for their collaboration and invitation to contribute to this volume. N.G.S. is supported by Michigan State University.
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Swenson, N.G. (2012). Phylogenetic Analyses of Ecological Communities Using DNA Barcode Data. In: Kress, W., Erickson, D. (eds) DNA Barcodes. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 858. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-61779-591-6_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-61779-591-6_20
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Publisher Name: Humana Press, Totowa, NJ
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