https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6148-3291
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ABSTRACT
Background
Coexisting plant species frequently exhibit marked differences in leaf damage caused by chewing insects. Such variation in leaf herbivory has often been attributed to interspecific differences in leaf defensive traits, leaf nutritional quality and leaf abundance.
Aims
We aimed to investigate the hypothesis that plants surrounded by more similar neighbours tend to exhibit higher levels of herbivory than plants surrounded by less similar neighbours.
Methods
We sampled 27 tree and shrub species in 49 plots of 10 m2 located in a Neotropical savanna. For each of the 815 plants sampled, we quantified leaf damage, specific leaf area, leaf toughness, height, and conspecific abundance. We analysed the relationship between herbivory levels and plant traits comparing each individual with its neighbouring plants. The effect of phylogenetic similarity was addressed using the mean phylogenetic distance between a focal plant individual and its neighbours (i.e., the phylogenetic isolation).
Results
Leaf herbivory damage ranged from zero to 29.6%. We found that phylogenetic isolation, specific leaf area, plant height, and plant abundance were not related to differences in leaf herbivory at the individual level in a neighbourhood.
Conclusions
Our findings show that leaf herbivory damage of individual plants was not consistently influenced either by phylogenetic or by trait similarity with neighbours.
Acknowledgements
We thank the team of the Long-term Ecological Research project for helping us in the field, and the Universidade Federal de Goiás and Emas National Park for providing logistical and field support. We thank Divino Silvério for help with statistical analyses. We are very grateful to Bastien Castagneyrol, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors Laszlo Nagy and Richard Abbott for comments that greatly improved the manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Leandro Maracahipes
Leandro Maracahipes is interested in functional traits, their evolution and implications on ecological processes; response of ecosystems to fire, deforestation, climate change and land use, and intensification of agriculture in the tropics.
Walter S. de Araújo
Walter S. de Araújo is interested in understanding patterns in ecological interactions with emphasis in plant-insect ecological networks.
Fernando L. Sobral
Fernando L. Sobral is interested in using functional and phylogenetic approaches to understand the processes that shape biodiversity at different spatial and temporal scales.
Leonardo L. Bergamini
Leonardo L. Bergamini is a researcher interested in the evolutionary ecology of insect-plant interaction and in the use of biodiversity information to better inform policy-making and conservation.
Mário Almeida-Neto
Mário Almeida-Neto is a professor, his main interest is community ecology, focusing on ecological networks and metacommunity patterns.
Marcus V. Cianciaruso
Marcus V. Cianciaruso is a professor whose work is focused on the phylogenetic and functional ecology of communities.