Percentage leaf herbivory across vascular plant species

Abstract

Herbivory is viewed as a major driver of plant evolution and the mostimportant energy pathway from plants to higher trophic levels. Therefore, understandingpatterns of herbivory on plants remains a key focus in evolution and ecology. Theevolutionary impacts of leaf herbivory include altering plant fitness, local adaptation, theevolution of defenses, and the diversification of plants as well as natural enemies. Leafherbivory also impacts ecological processes such as plant productivity, communitycomposition, and ecosystem nutrient cycling. Understanding the impact of herbivory onthese ecological and evolutionary processes requires species-specific, as opposed tocommunity-level, measures of herbivory. In addition, species-specific data enables the use ofmodern comparative methods to account for phylogenetic non-independence. Althoughhundreds of studies have measured natural rates of leaf consumption, we are unaware of anyaccessible compilation of these data. We created such a data set to provide the raw dataneeded to test general hypotheses relating to plant–herbivore interactions and to test theinfluence of biotic and abiotic factors on herbivory rates across large spatial scales. A largerepository will make this endeavor more efficient and robust. In total, we compiled 2641population-level measures for either annual or daily rates of leaf herbivory across 1145 speciesof vascular plants collected from 189 studies. All damage measures represent naturaloccurrences of herbivory that span numerous angiosperm, gymnosperm, and fern species. Toenable researchers to explore the causes of variation in herbivory and how these mightinteract, we added information about the study sites including: geolocation, climateclassification, habitat descriptions (e.g., seashore, grassland, forest, agricultural fields), andplant trait information concerning growth form and duration (e.g., annual vs. perennial). Wealso included extensive details of the methodology used to measure leaf damage, includingseasons and months of sampling, age of leaves, and the method used to estimate percentagearea missing. We anticipate that these data will make it possible to test important hypothesesin the plant–herbivore literature, including the plant apparency hypothesis, the latitudinalherbivorydefense hypothesis, the resource availability hypothesis, and the macroevolutionaryescalation of defense hypothesis

Latitudinal variation in herbivory: hemispheric asymmetries and the role of climatic drivers

“…For example, data that quantified accumulated damage present on mature leaves, data collected at the end of the growing season and data summed damage of individual leaves over one month or more were included (Turcotte et al . ). Daily herbivory rates in the cited data set were excluded (Turcotte et al .…”

“…We preferred to use the unweighted mean herbivory for each data point in our analyses, as in the analyses in two previous studies (Turcotte et al . ; Lim, Fine & Mittelbach ). This criterion allowed inclusion of as many species and study sites as possible in our analyses.…”

Macroecological and macroevolutionary patterns of leaf herbivory across vascular plants

“…In all, we collated 2085 population-level estimates of per cent leaf herbivory caused by naturally colonizing herbivores on 1058 vascular plant species from 161 families, collected from 174 studies (electronic supplementary material, table S6), representing a combined dataset many times larger than previous compilations [1,13,16,17]. Turcotte et al [36] recently published the populationlevel data for these 174 studies and an additional 15 studies.…”

Implementation of a Marauding Insect Module (MIM, version 1.0) in the Integrated BIosphere Simulator (IBIS, version 2.6b4) dynamic vegetation–land surface model

“…Bright et al, 2013;Maness et al, 2013;Mikkelson et al, 2013a;Pugh and Gordon, 2013;Metcalfe et al, 2014;Reed et al, 2014;Seidl et al, 2014;Turcotte et al, 2014;Vanderhoof et al, 2014;Landry and Parrott, 2016). Yet the simulation of insect-induced plant damage in climate models has lagged behind the simulation of fire, even though the two disturbance types were recognized as climate-related phenomena worthwhile of explicit representation in dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) more than 15 years ago (Fosberg et al, 1999).…”