Data from: Phylogenetic signal in diatom ecology: perspectives for aquatic ecosystems biomonitoring

Diatoms include a great diversity of taxa and are recognized as powerful bioindicators in rivers. However using diatoms for monitoring programs is costly and time consuming because most of the methodologies necessitate species-level identification. This raises the question of the optimal tradeoff between taxonomic resolution and bioassessment quality. Phylogenetic tools may form the bases of new more efficient approaches for biomonitoring if relationships between ecology and phylogeny can be demonstrated. We estimated the ecological optima of 127 diatom species for 19 environmental parameters using count data from 2119 diatom communities sampled during 8 years in eastern France. Using uni- and multivariate analyses, we explored the relationships between freshwater diatom phylogeny and ecology (i.e. the phylogenetic signal). We found a significant phylogenetic signal for many of the ecological optima that were tested, but the strength of the signal varied significantly from one trait to another. Multivariate analysis also showed that the multidimensional ecological niche of diatoms can be strongly related to phylogeny. The presence of clades containing species that exhibit homogeneous ecology suggests that phylogenetic information can be useful for aquatic biomonitoring. This study highlights the presence of significant patterns of ecological optima for freshwater diatoms in relation to their phylogeny. These results suggest the presence of a signal above the species level, which is encouraging for the development of simplified methods for biomonitoring survey.Alignement of the 18S sequences (all)This is an alignment of all the 18S sequences in FASTA format.S18_all.fasAlignement of the 18S sequences (after pruning)This is an alignment of the 18S sequences after tree pruning step, in FASTA format.S18_pruned.fasTaxonomic names of 18S sequencesThis is a table that connects sequence IDs with taxonomic information (genus and species names).S18_char.txtAlignement of the rbcL sequences (after pruning)This is an alignment of the rbcL sequences after tree pruning step, in FASTA format.rbcl_pruned.fasAlignement of the rbcL sequences (all)This is an alignment of all the rbcL sequences in FASTA format.rbcl_all.fasTaxonomic names of rbcL sequencesThis is a table that connects sequence IDs with taxonomic information (genus and species names).rbcl_char.txtAlignement of the 18S and rbcL sequences (after union)This is an alignment of the 18S and rbcL sequences after union step, in FASTA format.concat_union.fasAlignement of the 18S and rbcL sequences (after intersection)This is an alignment of the 18S and rbcL sequences after intersection step, in FASTA format.concat_intersect.fasPhylogenetic tree of diatoms (union data)This is a phylogeny reconstructed by Maximum Likelihood with the union dataset.ML_concat_union.trePhylogenetic tree of diatoms (intersection data)This is a phylogeny reconstructed by Maximum Likelihood with the intersection dataset.ML_concat_intersect.treDiatoms ecological optimaThis a table of ecological optima for 128 species of diatoms and 19 environmental parametersData_Ecol_Optima.cs