Abstract
Rapid warming is predicted to increase insect herbivory across the tundra biome, yet how this will impact the community and ecosystem dynamics remains poorly understood. Increasing background invertebrate herbivory could impede Arctic greening, by serving as a top–down control on tundra vegetation. Many tundra ecosystems are also susceptible to severe insect herbivory outbreaks which can have lasting effects on vegetation communities. To explore how tundra-insect herbivore systems respond to warming, we measured shrub traits and foliar herbivory damage at 16 sites along a landscape gradient in western Greenland. Here we show that shrub foliar insect herbivory damage on two dominant deciduous shrubs, Salix glauca and Betula nana, was positively correlated with increasing temperatures throughout the first half of the 2017 growing season. We found that the majority of insect herbivory damage occurred in July, which was outside the period of rapid leaf expansion that occurred throughout most of June. Defoliators caused the most foliar damage in both shrub species. Additionally, insect herbivores removed a larger proportion of B. nana leaf biomass in warmer sites, which is due to a combination of increased foliar herbivory with a coinciding decline in foliar biomass. These results suggest that the effects of rising temperatures on both insect herbivores and host species are important to consider when predicting the trajectory of Arctic tundra shrub expansion.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Francesca Governali, Alexandra Stendhal, Edward Darling, Angela Spickard and Paul Zietz for their assistance with field and laboratory work. Additionally, we would like to thank Elizabeth Studer and Lauren Culler for their help with arthropod identification.
Funding
This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Joint Science Education Grant (Award No. 1506155) to R. Virginia and a 2017 American Alpine Club Research Grant awarded to R. Finger Higgens.
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RFH conceived and designed the experiments; other authors provided advice and support. RFH and MD conducted field work and laboratory analyses. RFH analyzed the data. RFH wrote the manuscript; other authors provided editorial advice.
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Communicated by Evan H. DeLucia.
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Finger-Higgens, R., DeSiervo, M., Ayres, M.P. et al. Increasing shrub damage by invertebrate herbivores in the warming and drying tundra of West Greenland. Oecologia 195, 995–1005 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04899-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04899-7