Search

Plant functional traits affect the capacity of herbivores to find, choose, and consume plants. However, in a community composed of different plant species, it is unclear what proportion of herbivory on a focal plant is explained by its own traits and which is explained by the characteristics of the surrounding vegetation (i.e., nonadditive effects). Moreover, nonadditive effects could be positive or negative, and it is not known if they are related to community properties such as diversity. To quantify nonadditive effects, we developed four different additive models based on monoculture herbivory rates or plant traits and combined them with measurements of standing invertebrate herbivore damage along an experimental plant diversity gradient ranging from monocultures to 60-species mixtures. In all four models, positive nonadditive effects were detected, i.e., herbivory levels were higher in polycultures than what was expected from monoculture data, and these effects contributed up to 25% of the observed variance in herbivory. Importantly, the nonadditive effects, which were defined as the deviance of the models' predictions from the observed herbivory, were positively correlated with the communities' plant species richness. Consequently, interspecific interactions appear to have an important impact on the levels of herbivory of a community. Identifying those community properties that capture the effects of these interactions is a next important challenge for our understanding of how the environment interacts with plant traits to drive levels of herbivory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invertebrate herbivores can impact plant performance and plant communities. Conversely, plants can affect the ability of herbivores to find, choose, and consume them through their functional traits. While single plant traits have been related to rates of herbivory, most often involving single herbivore-plant pairs, much less is known about which suite of plant traits is important for determining herbivory for a pool of plant species interacting with a natural herbivore community. In this study we measured aboveground herbivore damage on 51 herbaceous species growing in monocultures of a grassland biodiversity experiment and collected 42 different plant traits representing four trait groups: physiological, morphological, phenological, and herbivore related. Using the method of random forests and multiple regression, we identified seven traits that are important predictors of herbivore damage (leaf nitrogen and lignin concentration, number of coleopteran and hemipteran herbivores potentially feeding on the plants, leaf life span, stem growth form, and root architecture); leaf nitrogen and lignin concentration were the two most important predictors. The final model accounted for 63% of the variation in herbivore damage. Traits from all four trait groups were selected, showing that a variety of plant characteristics can be statistically important when assessing folivory, including root traits. Our results emphasize that it is necessary to use a multivariate approach for identifying traits affecting complex ecological processes such as herbivory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]