pez

pez quantifies phylogenetic relationships among species and incorporates phylogenetic information into ecological analyses to assess biodiversity patterns and evolutionary processes.

Key Features:

• Measurement: Quantifies phylogenetic relationships among species within ecological communities to assess relatedness and shared evolutionary history.
• Modeling: Integrates phylogenetic information into ecological models to account for evolutionary relatedness in prediction and inference.
• Simulation: Simulates ecological data under specified phylogenetic scenarios for hypothesis testing and model validation.

Scientific Applications:

• Community assembly: Tests hypotheses about species coexistence and assembly rules by incorporating phylogenetic relatedness among taxa.
• Species distribution modeling: Evaluates how evolutionary history influences species' geographic distributions and niche relationships.
• Conservation biology: Assesses phylogenetic diversity and relatedness to inform conservation prioritization and measures of evolutionary distinctiveness.
• Evolutionary ecology: Investigates trait evolution, phylogenetic signal, and the role of shared ancestry in ecological interactions.

Methodology:

Aggregates existing data structures and methods into a unified framework and is implemented in R.