Tree seedling richness, but not neighborhood composition, influences insect herbivory in a temperate deciduous forest community.

ABSTRACT: Insect herbivores can serve as important regulators of plant dynamics, but their impacts in temperate forest understories have received minimal attention at local scales. Here, we test several related hypotheses about the influence of plant neighborhood composition on insect leaf damage in southwestern Pennsylvania, USA. Using data on seedlings and adult trees sampled at 36 sites over an approximately 900 ha area, we tested for the effects of total plant density, rarefied species richness (i.e., resource concentration and dietary-mixing hypotheses), conspecific density (i.e., Janzen-Connell hypothesis), and heterospecific density (i.e., herd-immunity hypothesis), on the proportion of leaf tissue removed from 290 seedlings of 20 species. We also tested for the effects of generic- and famili

SUBMITTER: Murphy SJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5016651 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature