Biologic interactions determining geographic range size: a one species response to phylogenetic community structure

Range size variation in closely related species suggests different responses to biotic and abiotic heterogeneity across large geographic regions. Species turnover generates a wide spectrum of species assemblages, resulting in different competition intensities among taxa, creating restrictions as important as environmental constraints. We chose to adopt the widely used phylogenetic relatedness (NRI) measurement to define a metric that depicts competition strength (via phylogenetic similarity), which one focal species confronts in its environment. This new approach (NRI(focal)) measures the potential of the community structure effect over performance of a single species. We chose two ecologically similar Peucaea sparrows, which co-occur and have highly dissimilar range size to test whether the population response to competition intensity is different between species. We analyzed the correlation between both Peucaea species population sizes and NRI(focal) using data from point counts. Results indicated that the widespread species population size was not associated with NRI(focal), whereas the population of restricted-sized species exhibited a negative relationship with competition intensity. Consequently, a species' sensitivity to competition might be a limiting factor to range expansion, which provides new insights into geographic range analysis and community ecology.