A highly resolved network reveals the role of terrestrial herbivory in structuring aboveground food webs

Abstract

Terrestrial ecosystems support rich communities of species feeding on each other in different ways. Insects and plants comprise much of this species richness, but the structure of their feeding interactions in aboveground terrestrial food webs is not well known. Historically, food web research has coarsely or unevenly grouped insects and plants, excluded “mutualistic” feeding interactions (e.g., pollinators eating nectar), and focused only on subsets of species or feeding interactions, especially “antagonistic” interactions involving tetrapods. Here, we combine public data and records from a biological research station into a cumulative food web of ∼580,000 interactions among ∼3,800 species in a temperate hardwood forest ecosystem. We include all feeding interactions, subdivided by whether animal tissues or plant leaves, flowers, fruits, or wood are being eaten. We represent these different types of feeding interactions in a multiplex food web and study the effect of taxonomic resolution on our understanding of food web structure. Our results indicate that insect herbivores engage in highly species– and tissue-specific feeding that is inaccurately represented by coarse taxonomic groups. The food web presented here is the richest and most evenly-resolved representation of feeding interactions yet reported and provides a tool for future management and research on terrestrial ecosystems.

A highly resolved network reveals the role of terrestrial herbivory in structuring aboveground food webs

“…Data accessibility. Data and code are provided as supplementary material [53]. Species and interaction data are openly available via the Environmental Data Initiative at [78].…”

“…The site has, in recent years, been restored to predominantly dry-mesic, northern hardwood forests with patches of wooded wetlands (hardwood conifer swamp) [52]. A full description of the UMBS site and extended methods are available in the electronic supplementary material [53]. Briefly, experts (generally, the authors) vetted and approved species lists of mammals, amphibians, reptiles, vascular plants, birds, insects and non-insect arthropods from UMBS records.…”

“…The site has, in recent years, been restored to predominantly dry-mesic, northern hardwood forests with patches of wooded wetlands (hardwood conifer swamp) [52]. A full description of the UMBS site and extended methods are available in the electronic supplementary material [53].…”