Neutrality in plant–herbivore interactions

Understanding the distribution of herbivore damage among leaves and individual plants is a central goal of plant-herbivore biology. Commonly observed unequal patterns of herbivore damage have conventionally been attributed to the heterogeneity in plant quality or herbivore behavior or distribution. Meanwhile, the potential role of stochastic processes in structuring plant-herbivore interactions has been overlooked. Here, we show that based on simple first principle expectations from metabolic theory, random sampling of different sizes of herbivores from a regional pool is sufficient to explain patterns of variation in herbivore damage. This is despite making the neutral assumption that herbivory is caused by randomly feeding herbivores on identical and passive plants. We then compared its predictions against 765 datasets of herbivory on 496 species across 116° of latitude from the Herbivory Variability Network. Using only one free parameter, the estimated attack rate, our neutral model ..., The details can be found on the HerbVar website: https://herbvar.org/protocols.html and the supplement of Pan & Wetzel 2024. , , # Neutrality in Plant–Herbivore Interactions

## Description of the data and file structure

`HV_data_cleaned_long.csv` and `HV_data_cleaned_short.csv`

* surveyID: surveyID
* MAT: Mean annual temperature in C
* MAP: Mean annual precipitation in mm
* plantHeight_cm: plant height in cm
* numLeaves: number of leaves on a single plant
* plantID3.long: Unique plant ID
* Lat: plant latitude in degrees decimals
* Long: plant longitude in degrees decimals (some of the coordinates censored for protection of rare plants)
* percHerbPlant_EstimationMethod: did the survey follow HerbVar protocol? 'hvp' is the highest precision, followed by 'hv', and then the bin resolution
* PI: Principal investiger
* siteSimp: Site name
* leafID: Leaf ID
* percLf: Proportion herbivory on the leaf
* species: plant species
* genus: plant genus
* sp: plant species name
* family: plant family
* n.avg: median number of leaves within a survey

## Sharing/Access information

Data w...