PD is widely used in conservation biology, but it is not always appreciated that PD provides a framework for many different calculations, including PD complementarity, PD endemism, and probabilistic PD calculations integrating extinction probabilities. PD provides useful measures for community ecology, including PD clumping and dispersion indices. Because the PD calculus operates as if it is estimating indices at the level of features of organisms, any community measure conventionally applied at the species level can be transformed to a features-level measure using PD calculations. This flexibility counters recent claims that PD excludes the use of abundance and other information. For community ecology, the PD framework provides a natural set of community dissimilarity measures. The PD/features analogue of the species-level Bray Curtis measure is a robust measure for ordination analyses, revealing the environmental gradients that link to phylogenetic structure among communities. The robust assumption is of general unimodal responses of features to environmental gradients. However, such overall phylogenetic dissimilarities sometimes may hide useful information. For inferences about the role of competition, each ancestral node in a phylogeny provides separate information, based on the clumping vs dispersion (in environmental space) of its descendent PD.