Canopy height, rather than neighborhood effects, shapes leaf herbivory in a tropical rainforest.

Factors shaping the interspecific variations in herbivory have puzzled ecologists for decades and several hypotheses have been proposed to explain interspecific variation in leaf herbivory. In a tropical rainforest in Yunnan Province, China, we collected 6732 leaves from 129 species with canopy heights ranging from 1.6 m to 65.0 m above the ground. We tested the role of canopy height, the diversity, composition and structural heterogeneity of neighbors and leaf traits in shaping the interspecific variations in herbivory. Results show that leaf herbivory decreased with canopy height and specific leaf area (SLA) and increased with leaf size. However, neighboring species' diversity, composition, and structural heterogeneity showed no association with herbivory. Therefore, neither visual apparency effect nor the associational resistance effect was detected in this hyper-diverse tropical rainforest. These findings highlight the importance of vertical structure in shaping herbivory patterns in natural communities.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Ecology

• Publication date

  2023-03-10

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1002/ecy.4028PMID 36898962
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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