Journal
BIOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 11, Issue 7, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2015.0480
Keywords
background herbivory; climate; global environmental change; insect-plant relationships; woody plants
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Funding
- Academy of Finland [122133, 268124, 276671]
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The existing scenarios generally predict that herbivory will increase with climate warming. An analysis of the published data on the background foliar losses of woody plants to insects in natural ecosystems across the globe from 1952 to 2013 provided no support for this hypothesis. We detected no temporal trend in herbivory within the temperate climate zone and a significant decrease in herbivory in the tropics. From 1964 to 1990, herbivory in the tropics was 39% higher than in the temperate region, but these differences disappeared by the beginning of the 2000s. Thus, environmental changes have already disturbed one of the global ecological patterns-the decrease in herbivory with latitude-by affecting ecosystem processes differently in tropical and temperate climate zones.
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