Love thy neighbor? reciprocal impacts between plant community structure and insect herbivory in co‐occurring Asteraceae
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Patterns of herbivory may vary with fine‐scale plant community structure: the degree of damage plants experience may depend on their neighbors (i.e., associational resistance or susceptibility). Differential herbivory, in turn, may facilitate a shift in plant community structure. We investigated these reciprocal effects of plant community structure and insect herbivory in a field mesocosm experiment with closely related, native Asteraceae that co‐occur in early‐successional habitats (old fields). After one year of establishment, we excluded or augmented insect herbivores for two years in equal‐density communities of three types: goldenrod‐dominated ( Solidago spp.) or aster‐dominated ( Symphyotrichum spp.) congeneric communities and mixtures of the two genera. In manipulated outbreaks, overall and species‐specific patterns of herbivory by the main herbivore, the leaf beetle Trirhabda virgata , varied dramatically with community composition. In both years, the preferred goldenrods suffered 25−70% higher defoliation in mixtures with the less‐preferred asters (i.e., associational susceptibility), compared to when growing with congeners; in contrast, asters experienced lower damage in mixtures (i.e., associational resistance). Insect herbivory consistently reduced overall plant productivity, and promoted colonization by other old‐field species. Importantly, herbivory also initiated a shift in the structure of the plant communities, and this effect depended on the starting community composition, implying potential reciprocal effects. For instance, only in mixtures did elevated herbivory reduce the proportional abundance of the preferred host, and the old‐field dominant, Solidago altissima . Our findings underscore the importance of plant community composition for variation in and impacts of herbivory and suggest the possibility of feedbacks between herbivory and local community structure as one of the mechanisms contributing to the maintenance of vegetation heterogeneity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".