The interplay between defaunation and phylogenetic diversity affect leaf damage by natural enemies in tropical plants

Natural enemies play an important role in controlling plant population growth and vegetation dynamics. Tropical rainforests host the greatest diversity of herbivores, from large mammalian ungulates to microscopic pathogens, generating and maintaining plant diversity.
By feeding on the same resources, large mammalian herbivores may interfere with plant consumption and leaf damage by important enemy guilds such as invertebrate herbivores and pathogens, triggering indirect trophic cascades. However, the impact of local extinctions of large herbivores on plant-enemy interactions is relatively unknown.
We experimentally tested the effects of defaunation of large mammalian herbivores (e.g., peccaries, tapirs, brocket deer; hereafter, large herbivores) on leaf damage of 3,350 understory plants in tropical rainforests of Brazil. We examined leaf damage in 10,050 leaves from 333 morphospecies by assigning the area consumed or damaged by five guilds of insect herbivores and leaf pathogens within..., Our study was carried out in a multi-site, long-term experiment (DEFAU-BIOTA), distributed at four study sites located in protected areas of the Atlantic Forest in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The four sites have different compositions of large herbivore communities, but nevertheless, a rich assemblage of species can be found in all of them.  Due to different human pressures, sites differ in the presence of the largest ground-dwelling mammal species, the white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari) and the tapir (Tapirus terrestris) (Galetti et al., 2017). Although both species are present at site Itamambuca [ITA], only white-lipped peccaries are present at Ilha do Cardoso State Park [CAR]; at Carlos Botelho State Park [CBO] only tapirs are found, and neither of the species are present at Vargem Grande [VGM].
In each site, we installed 15 paired plots (5 m long x 3 m wide) in 2009–2010, but some of the plots collapsed over time; as a result, the data in this work were collected in nine pair..., , # The interplay between defaunation and phylogenetic diversity affect leaf damage by natural enemies in tropical plants

This dataset is the original data sampled from a defaunation experiment, in which large mammalian herbivores were excluded, using a paired design of open-closed plots. The dataset contains the raw records of leaf damage caused by plants' natural enemies, using the herbivory index described in the main text, and before any averaging and/or analyses.

The variables included in the dataset are as follows:

* local: protected area in which the data was collected, ie., Itamambuca [ITA], Ilha do Cardoso State Park [CAR]; Carlos Botelho State Park [CBO]; Vargem Grande [VGM].
* plot: sequential number (1 to 86) identifying the pairwise plots studied within each local.
* treatment: each pairwise plot is composed of two treatments = open (or the control plot, in which large mammals have open access) and closed (fenced, in which large mammals are excluded).
* plotID = ...