首页|Effects of plant diversity and leaf traits on insect herbivory in plantation and natural forests
Effects of plant diversity and leaf traits on insect herbivory in plantation and natural forests
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NSTL
Elsevier
? 2022 Elsevier B.V.Conversion from natural forest to timber plantation is an important cause of pristine forests loss. These changes alter community structure and cause a decrease in the diversity of plant communities. Leaf functional traits, which are an important defensive strategy, might also be influenced by such alterations. Altogether, shifts from natural forest to timber plantation may lead to profound changes in plant-plant and plant-animal interactions, including herbivory and the relative abundance of different feeding guilds, an important aspect of forest ecosystem function and community dynamics. In this study, we assessed insect herbivore damage in saplings of four native tree species in the understory of natural forests and two types of ca. 80-year-old timber plantations. We measured leaf damage by the most common feeding guilds in over 9000 leaves from 200 saplings. We first compared herbivory between natural forest and plantations, and we then analyzed the drivers of herbivory and of the two most common guilds – chewers and miners – using several indices of forest structure and leaf traits as predictors. Total herbivory did not change among forest types, but it showed some variation in two of the four species. Herbivory decreased with increasing species richness and increased with increasing basal area of conspecific and heterospecific trees. Leaf damage caused by chewers increased with leaf thickness, while damage caused by miners showed the opposite relationship. On an ecological level, our findings support expectations from the resource concentration hypothesis and on the role of leaf traits in mediating the impact of insect feeding guilds on leaf herbivory. On an applied level, these results suggest that timber plantations can support similar levels of ecosystem processes than natural forests decades after their establishment. Allowing the regeneration of a diverse understory in plantation forests should be implemented to favor ecosystem dynamics close to those of the original forests.
BiodiversityFunctional traitsInsect herbivoryLand use changePlantationTaiwan
Martini F.、Sun I.-F.、Chen Y.-Y.
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Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Ecology and Sustainability National Dong Hwa University
NSTL
Elsevier
