Supporting data for "Tropical moth responses to environmental change in a brighter and warmer world"

Artificial light at night (ALAN) and climate change are transforming tropical ecosystems. This thesis investigates how these dual stressors shape moth communities, trophic interactions, and functional traits across spatial and temporal scales in tropical and subtropical forests. In highly urbanized Hong Kong, neither direct ALAN nor skyglow altered moth abundance, richness, or composition, suggesting that community filtering from historical land-use may have already occurred. However, isolating ALAN's effect from land-use in an experiment at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in China revealed that light suppressed predation pressure in primary forest despite increasing prey abundance, while a secondary regenerating forest showed no response, indicating that habitat disturbance mediates ALAN's ecological effects. Shifting from community patterns to functional consequences, I then show that climate change has shifted the elevational structuring of moth communities over time, but while communities have homogenized, trait-environment relationships have not yet shifted. Finally, I synthesize these findings with the concept that the evolutionary circadian entrainment of organisms to natural photoperiods may create biogeographic patterns of vulnerability to light pollution. Together, this thesis reveals that ALAN's effects are context-dependent, mediated by land-use history and prior disturbance, and that evolutionary legacies may shape how tropical insects respond to novel anthropogenic change.