On the risks of using dendrograms to measure functional diversity and multidimensional spaces to measure phylogenetic diversity: a comment on Sobral et al. (2016)

Abstract

Sobral et al. (Ecology Letters, 19, 2016, 1091) reported that the loss of bird functional and phylogenetic diversity due to species extinctions was not compensated by exotic species introductions. Here, we demonstrate that the reported changes in biodiversity were underestimated because of methodological pitfalls.

Keywords: Euclidean space; cophenetic distance; dendrogram; functional diversity; functional space; phylogenetic diversity.