Intra and interspecific diversity in a tropical plant clade alter herbivory and ecosystem resilience

Declines in biodiversity generated by anthropogenic stressors at both species and population levels can alter emergent processes instrumental to ecosystem function and resilience. As such, understanding the role of biodiversity in ecosystem function and its response to climate perturbation is increasingly important, especially in tropical systems where responses to changes in biodiversity are less predictable and more challenging to assess experimentally. Using large scale transplant experiments conducted at five neotropical sites, we documented the impacts of changes in intraspecific and interspecific plant richness in the genus Piper on insect herbivory, insect richness, and ecosystem resilience to perturbations in water availability. We found that reductions of both intraspecific and interspecific Piper diversity had dramatic and site specific effects on herbivory, herbivorous insect richness, and plant mortality. Ecosystem responses to reduced intraspecific richness were often simil..., , , # Intra and interspecific diversity in a tropical plant clade alter herbivory and ecosystem resilience

This data set contains response of herbivory and herbivorous insect richness to manipulations of water availability, intraspecific and interspecific *Piper* diversity at five neotropical sites

Metadata and file descriptions are located in the downloadable dataset.

## Description of the Data and file structure

* Metadata_and_code_descriptions.xlsx
* contains metadata for all data and code files

* \"raw\" folder
* contains raw data files to be processed by code
* Files herbivory_master_file_with_mogi, 2018_Rainfall_MetData_LS, peru_detailed_climate_data contain blank cells which cannot be removed due to assumptions of code. Blanks in herbivory_master_file_with_mogi can be interpreted as NAs. Blanks in 2018_Rainfall_MetData_LS, peru_detailed_climate_data represent formatting between data tables. Further details are described in the metadata file
* \"formatted\" ...