Effects of abiotic environment on invertebrate herbivory depend on plant community context in a montane grassland

Abstract

Invertebrate herbivores are important and diverse, and their abundance and impacts are expected to undergo unprecedented shifts under climate change. Yet, past studies of invertebrate herbivory have documented a wide variety of responses to changing temperature, making it challenging to predict the direction and magnitude of these shifts. One explanation for these idiosyncratic responses is that changing environmental conditions may drive concurrent changes in plant communities and herbivore traits. Thus, the impacts of changing temperature on herbivory might depend on how temperature combines and interacts with characteristics of plant communities and the herbivores that occupy them. Here, we test this hypothesis by surveying invertebrate herbivory in 220, 0.5 meter-diameter herbaceous plant communities along a 1101-meter elevational gradient. Our results suggest that increasing temperature can drive community-level herbivory via at least three overlapping mechanisms: increasing temperature directly reduced herbivory, indirectly affected herbivory by reducing phylogenetic diversity of the plant community, and indirectly affected herbivory by altering the effects of functional and phylogenetic diversity on herbivory. Consequently, increasing functional diversity of plant communities had a negative effect on herbivory, but only in colder environments while a positive effect of increasing phylogenetic diversity was observed in warmer environments. Moreover, accounting for differences among herbivore feeding guilds considerably improved model fit, because different herbivore feeding guilds varied in their response to temperature and plant community composition. Together, these results highlight the importance of considering both plant and herbivore community context in order to predict how climate change will alter invertebrate herbivory.