In a paper recently published in Polar Biology, Sarah Rheubottom and collaborators investigate patterns of invertebrate herbivory across the tundra biome. Previous studies measuring invertebrate herbivory in tundra focused on a single host plant or a small group of species, but for the first time, in this study losses of plant tissue to invertebrate herbivores are assessed at the plant community level across a large number of tundra sites. The study also addressed how these patterns relate to long-term climatic conditions and the weather in the year of sampling, habitat characteristics, and aboveground biomass production.
Invertebrate herbivores depend on external temperature for growth and metabolism, so invertebrate herbivory is expected to increase as a result of continued warming in tundra ecosystems. The study found that invertebrate herbivory occurred low intensities but was present at all sites. On average <1% of the total plant community biomass was removed by invertebrate herbivores. The intensity of herbivory was influenced by mid-summer temperature, with warmer sites having greater leaf damage, but most of the variation in herbivory was associated with local ecological factors. More details about the local drivers of invertebrate herbivory are necessary to predict the consequences for rapidly changing tundra ecosystems.
Reference: Rheubottom, S.I., Barrio, I.C., Kozlov, M.V., Alatalo, J.M., Andersson, T., Asmus, A., Baubin, C., Brearley, F.Q., Egelkraut, D., Ehrich, D., Gauthier, G., Jónsdóttir, I.S., Konieczka, S., Lévesque, E., OLOFSSON, J., Prévey, J., Slevan-Tremblay, G., Sokolov, A., Sokolova, N., Sokovnina, S., Speed, J.D.M., Suominen, O., Zverev, V., Hik, D.S. (2019) Hiding in the background: community-level patterns in invertebrate herbivory across the tundra biome. Polar Biology (in press)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-019-02568-3
Picture: Damage by leaf miner on Betula nana (photo: Isabel C Barrio, Agricultural University of Iceland, 2017)