Woody plant secondary chemicals increase in response to abundant deer and arrival of invasive plants in suburban forests

Abstract

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Ecological and metabolomic responses of plants to deer exclosure in a suburban forest

“…Despite the multiple hypotheses put forward to explain the variability in defense phenotypes in plant communities and the growth-defense tradeoff (Cipollini et al, 2014;Endara & Coley, 2011), studies that compare the defense responses of different species to deer are lacking. Some ungulate exclosure experiments have investigated how plant chemistry is influenced by deer (Mason et al, 2010;Nosko et al, 2020;Stephan et al, 2017), but they mostly have not compared species, and there is only one published defense-related exclosure experiment conducted in suburban forests with overabundant deer (Morrison et al, 2022).…”