A unified framework reveals how evolutionary scale and abundance weighting shape phylogenetic community structure

Authors

Modin, O., Persson, F.

Abstract

Metrics describing phylogenetic community structure are widely used to infer assembly processes in biological communities, but existing metrics capture only fixed phylogenetic scales and provide limited control over how rare and abundant taxa influence ecological patterns. Here we introduce q-weighted interpolated mean phylogenetic distance (qiMPD), a framework that continuously interpolates between broad evolutionary divergence and nearest-taxon distance while incorporating tunable abundance weighting. Applied to 3661 wastewater microbiomes, qiMPD revealed that abundance weighting had little effect on broad-scale phylogenetic dispersion but strongly altered local phylogenetic structure. Null-model analyses showed that within-community signals of phylogenetic overdispersion and clustering, and between-community signals of phylogenetic divergence and convergence, emerged at different combinations of phylogenetic locality and abundance weighting. Thus, the qiMPD framework enables phylogenetic scale- and abundance-resolved inference of community assembly. It is implemented in the Python package qdiv version 4.2.0.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 08 Oct 2026.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this preprint? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.