Progress in phylogenetic community ecology is often limited by the availability of phylogenetic information and the lack of appropriate methods and solutions to deal with this problem. We estimate the effect of the lack of phylogenetic information on the relations among taxa measured by commonly used phylogenetic metrics in comparative studies and community ecology, namely: Blomberg’s K phylogenetic signal, Faith’s Phylogenetic Diversity (PD), Mean Phylogenetic Distance (MPD) and Mean Nearest Taxon Distance (MNTD). To overcome this problem, we tested two possible solutions: Polytomic trees and Operational trees. Our results show that the effects on K values strongly depended on the level of phylogenetic signal. In the case of the community metrics, the effects were insensitive to the patterns of species distribution in the communities. Community metrics tended to be overestimated with both Polytomic and Operational trees, but the overestimation was higher with Polytomic trees. PD and MPD metrics were less biased than MNTD metric. We show that the lack of phylogenetic resolution is not necessarily problematic for all analyses and that its effect will depend on the chosen metric and on the solutions used to deal with the problem. Based on our results, we suggest that ecologists should prefer the Operational tree solution to remove polytomies in the phylogenetic tree and take careful consideration while designing experiments, and analyzing and interpreting the results of phylogenetic metrics.

系统发育群落生态学的进展往往受到系统发育信息的可用性以及缺乏适当的方法和解决方案来解决这一问题的限制。我们通过比较研究和群落生态学中常用的系统发育指标来估计缺乏系统发育信息对分类群之间关系的影响，即：Blomberg 的 K 系统发育信号、Faith 的系统发育多样性 (PD)、平均系统发育距离 (MPD) 和平均值最近分类单元距离 (MNTD)。为了克服这个问题，我们测试了两种可能的解决方案：Polytomic 树和 Operational 树。我们的结果表明，对 K 值的影响很大程度上取决于系统发育信号的水平。在群落指标的情况下，影响对群落中物种分布的模式不敏感。Polytomic 和 Operational 树的社区指标往往被高估，但 Polytomic 树的高估更高。PD 和 MPD 指标的偏差小于 MNTD 指标。我们表明，系统发育分辨率的缺乏不一定对所有分析都有问题，其影响将取决于所选的度量标准和用于处理问题的解决方案。基于我们的结果，我们建议生态学家应该更喜欢 Operational tree 解决方案来消除系统发育树中的多分体，并在设计实验、分析和解释系统发育指标的结果时仔细考虑。我们表明，系统发育分辨率的缺乏不一定对所有分析都有问题，其影响将取决于所选的度量标准和用于处理问题的解决方案。根据我们的结果，我们建议生态学家应该更喜欢 Operational tree 解决方案来消除系统发育树中的多分式，并在设计实验、分析和解释系统发育指标的结果时仔细考虑。我们表明，系统发育分辨率的缺乏不一定对所有分析都有问题，其影响将取决于所选的度量标准和用于处理问题的解决方案。基于我们的结果，我们建议生态学家应该更喜欢 Operational tree 解决方案来消除系统发育树中的多分体，并在设计实验、分析和解释系统发育指标的结果时仔细考虑。