Arthropod constructs and host plants

The construction of
shelters on plants by arthropods might influence other organisms via changes in
colonization, community richness, species composition and functionality.
Arthropods, including beetles, caterpillars, sawflies, spiders, and wasps often
interact with host plants via the construction of shelters, building a variety
of structures such as leaf ties, tents, rolls, and bags; leaf and stem galls,
and hollowed out stems. Such constructs might have both an adaptive value in
terms of protection (i.e., serve as shelters) but may also exert a strong
influence on terrestrial community diversity in the engineered and neighboring
hosts via colonization by secondary occupants. While different traits of the
host plant (e.g., physical, chemical and architectural features) may affect the
potential for ecosystem engineering by insects, such effects have been, to a
certain degree, overlooked. Further analyses of how plant traits affect the
occurrence of shelters may thus enrich our understanding of the organizing
principles of plant-based communities. This dataset includes more than a
thousand unique records of ecosystem engineering by arthropods, in the form of
structures built on plants. All records have been published in the literature,
and span both natural structures (90.6% of the records) and structures
artificially created by researchers (9% of the records). The data were gathered
between 1932 and 2021, across more than 50 countries and several ecosystems,
ranging from polar to tropical zones. Besides data on host plants and
engineers, we aggregated data on the type of constructs and the identity of
inquilines using these structures. This dataset highlights the importance of
these subtle structures for the organization of terrestrial arthropod
communities, enabling hypotheses testing in ecological studies addressing
ecosystem engineering and facilitation mediated by constructs.