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Analysing the phylogenetic structure of natural communities may illuminate the processes governing the assembly and coexistence of species in ecological communities.

Unifying previous works, we present a statistical framework to quantify the phylogenetic structure of communities in terms of average divergence time between pairs of individuals or species, sampled from different sites. This framework allows an additive partitioning of the phylogenetic signal into alpha (within‐site) and beta (among‐site) components, and is closely linked to Simpson diversity. It unifies the treatment of intraspecific (genetic) and interspecific diversity, leading to the definition of differentiation coefficients among community samples (e.g. I_ST, P_ST) analogous to classical population genetics coefficients expressing differentiation among populations (e.g. F_ST, N_ST).

Two coefficients which express community differentiation among …