Phylogenetic diversity and species diversity are decoupled under experimental warming and cooling in Rocky Mountain plant communities

Aim Nearly 8% of species could go extinct from climate change; many organisms are already experiencing declines in abundance, local extinction, and range shifts. How such changes impact community diversity is an open question in most systems. Whether changes in phylogenetic diversity parallel those in traditional diversity metrics is also often unknown. We used experimentally transplanted plant communities to ask how different aspects of community diversity change with environmental factors across elevation, and whether phylogenetic relationships predict individual species’ responses to change. Location We experimentally transplanted subalpine plant communities down and upslope across 400 m of elevation at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Gothic, CO, USA, to simulate climate warming and cooling.

We identified how experimental warming and cooling impacted community diversity by testing for differences in species richness, Shannon diversity, and phylogenetic diversity among transplant treatments. We tested for phylogenetic signal in each species’ change in percent cover among treatments. Finally, we assessed if aspects of species’ rarity (and thus their putative extinction risk) predicted post-transplant change independently or in addition to their phylogenetic relationship within the community.

We found that species richness and Shannon diversity decreased in cooled treatments and increased in some warmed treatments. In contrast, phylogenetic diversity increased in the cooled treatment and did not change in the warmed treatments. Individual species’ changes in response to warming and cooling were not correlated with phylogeny or aspects of rarity. Main conclusions Our results suggest that species losses in cooled treatments are phylogenetically dispersed, increasing phylogenetic diversity, even as richness and Shannon diversity decline. Increasing richness and Shannon diversity in warmed treatments suggests that new species from across the phylogeny can colonize after transplantation, leading to stability in phylogenetic diversity under warming at this time scale, with further change likely as extinction debts are paid. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.