Exploring drives of ecological communities has been central to community ecology. Multiple factors have thought to influence community structure, including geographic isolation and area, niche-based, neutral, and historical processes. In the last two decades, community phylogenetic framework has emerged to integrate both ecological and evolutionary processes and their role in community structure.
Community phylogenetic method explicitly incorporates species’ evolutionary relationships, a proxy for how species are similar to each other based on DNA data. It helps to understand the relative role of different factors such as phylogenetic inertia, biogeography, and more contemporary ecological processes such as competition, habitat filtering, and predation simultaneously. It also helps community ecologists to link short‐term local processes to continental and global processes that occur over deep evolutionary time scales. In this lecture, I will discuss the merging of community ecology and phylogenetic biology, highlighting the challenges, debates, and new areas of enquiry in this field.