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It is commonly expected that exotic plants experience reduced herbivory, but experimental evidence for such enemy release is still controversial. One reason for conflicting results might be that community context has rarely been accounted for, although the surrounding plant diversity may moderate enemy release. Here, we tested the effects of focal tree origin and surrounding tree diversity on herbivore abundance and leaf damage in a cross-Atlantic tree-diversity experiment in Canada and Germany. We evaluated six European tree species paired with six North American congeners in both their native and exotic range, expecting lower herbivory for the exotic tree species in each pair at each site. Such reciprocal experiments have long been called for, but have not been realized thus far. In addition to a thorough evaluation of overall enemy release effects, we tested whether enemy release effects changed with the surrounding tree diversity. Herbivore abundance was indeed consistently lower on exotics across all six tree genera (12 comparisons). This effect of exotic status was independent of the continent, phylogenetic relatedness, and surrounding tree diversity. In contrast, leaf damage associated with generalist leaf chewers was consistently higher on North American tree species. Interestingly, several species of European weevils were the most abundant leaf chewers on both continents and the dominant herbivores at the Canadian site. Thus, most observed leaf damage is likely to reflect the effect of generalist herbivores that feed heavily on plant species with which they have not evolved. At the German site, sap suckers were the dominant herbivores and showed a pattern consistent with enemy release. Taken together, the consistently lower herbivory on exotics on both continents is not purely a pattern of enemy release in the strictest sense, but to some degree additionally reflects the susceptibility of native plants to invasive herbivores. In conclusion, our cross-Atlantic study is consistent with the idea that nonnative trees have generally reduced herbivory, regardless of tree community diversity and species identity, but for different reasons depending on the dominant herbivore guild., (© 2023 The Authors. Ecology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Ecological Society of America.)

Biodiversity is important for many ecosystem processes. Global declines in pollinator diversity and abundance have been recognized, raising concerns about a pollination crisis of crops and wild plants. However, experimental evidence for effects of pollinator species diversity on plant reproduction is extremely scarce. We established communities with 1-5 bee species to test how seed production of a plant community is determined by bee diversity. Higher bee diversity resulted in higher seed production, but the strongest difference was observed for one compared to more than one bee species. Functional complementarity among bee species had a far higher explanatory power than bee diversity, suggesting that additional bee species only benefit pollination when they increase coverage of functional niches. In our experiment, complementarity was driven by differences in flower and temperature preferences. Interspecific interactions among bee species contributed to realized functional complementarity, as bees reduced interspecific overlap by shifting to alternative flowers in the presence of other species. This increased the number of plant species visited by a bee community and demonstrates a new mechanism for a biodiversity-function relationship ("interactive complementarity"). In conclusion, our results highlight both the importance of bee functional diversity for the reproduction of plant communities and the need to identify complementarity traits for accurately predicting pollination services by different bee communities.

The structure of ecological interaction networks is often interpreted as a product of meaningful ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape the degree of specialization in community associations. However, here we show that both unweighted network metrics (connectance, nestedness, and degree distribution) and weighted network metrics (interaction evenness, interaction strength asymmetry) are strongly constrained and biased by the number of observations. Rarely observed species are inevitably regarded as "specialists," irrespective of their actual associations, leading to biased estimates of specialization. Consequently, a skewed distribution of species observation records (such as the lognormal), combined with a relatively low sampling density typical for ecological data, already generates a "nested" and poorly "connected" network with "asymmetric interaction strengths" when interactions are neutral. This is confirmed by null model simulations of bipartite networks, assuming that partners associate randomly in the absence of any specialization and any variation in the correspondence of biological traits between associated species (trait matching). Variation in the skewness of the frequency distribution fundamentally changes the outcome of network metrics. Therefore, interpretation of network metrics in terms of fundamental specialization and trait matching requires an appropriate control for such severe constraints imposed by information deficits. When using an alternative approach that controls for these effects, most natural networks of mutualistic or antagonistic systems show a significantly higher degree of reciprocal specialization (exclusiveness) than expected under neutral conditions. A higher exclusiveness is coherent with a tighter coevolution and suggests a lower ecological redundancy than implied by nested networks.