The phyllosphere is a wide and complex ecosystem that provides key support for microbial diversity. Fungal communities inhabiting the leaf are functionally variable and play important roles on plant performance. Factors conditioning the arrival and colonization of fungal communities will determine the phyllosphere fungal composition. Plant identity, leaf functional traits and host plant phylogeny have been shown to be regulators of the microbial colonization of the leaves and can be considered as biotic filters determining...

The analysis of spatial phylogenetic and phenotypic structure of plant communities provides insight into the underlying processes and interactions governing their assembly, and how these may change during plant ontogeny. We used point pattern analysis to find out if saplings and adult plants are surrounded by phylogenetically and phenotypically more similar or dissimilar neighbours than expected by chance, and whether these associations change from the sapling to the adult stage. To this end, we combined...