Do leaf traits shape herbivory in tropical montane rainforests? A multispecies approach
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ESA
Abstract
The co-evolutionary arms race between herbivores and plants forces plants to
evolve protection strategies that reduce the palatability of the plant modules
attacked by the herbivores. These characteristics of traits have consequences
for both the survival of plant individuals and the composition of plant commu-
nities. Thus, correlating traits of for instance leaves with herbivory is an
important step toward understanding the dynamics of plant populations and
communities. Traits can either be measured using conventional lab methods
or recently developed spectral sensing techniques. We examined whether leaf
traits of trees are related to herbivory in a multispecies approach. Furthermore,
we explored whether leaf traits characterized by spectral sensing provide similar
relations to herbivory as lab-based leaf traits. We established nine 1-ha square
plots evenly distributed over three different forest types in Ecuadorian tropical
montane rainforests where we estimated herbivory as the leaf area loss
(in square centimeters) of 20 (±5) leaves sampled from the canopies of 380 tree
individuals belonging to 51 tree species (7 ± 1 individuals/species) using lab-
and spectral-sensing-based methods. For each methodological approach, we
ran 100 linear mixed-effects models with all respective leaf traits as predictor
and herbivory as response variables for data subsets containing one randomly
selected tree individual of each species to estimate the range of the regression
coefficients for each trait. Automated stepwise backward selections determined
the frequency of each trait having an important influence on herbivory. We
found no clear relations between leaf traits and herbivory for neither lab- nor
spectral-sensing-based traits. A nested variance component analysis demon-
strated that the observed variability was mainly due to the variation in trait
concentrations between tree individuals of a species. Our results suggest that
snapshot data lead to a mismatch between herbivory and the concentrations of
traits during the peak of herbivory. Another explanation could be that environ-
mental conditions or processes along the food web are more important in
structuring herbivory than leaf traits.
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