Temperature-dependent shifts in multiple tri-trophic defense interactions on black cherry

Many plants engage in tri-trophic interactions whereby plants provide resources such as food or shelter to mutualists in exchange for protection against herbivores and pathogens. Despite their ecological importance, tri-trophic interactions are often context dependent, in which the magnitude and outcome of the interaction can shift under different abiotic and biotic conditions. Disentangling the effects of environmental factors, such as temperature, on tri-trophic interactions is especially important as temperature regimes shift under climate change, but few studies have explored how abiotic shifts affect tri-trophic interactions across multiple trophic groups in the same plant system. Here, we monitored 96 black cherry (Prunus serotina) seedlings for 10 weeks under ambient and increased temperatures to explore the effects of temperature on interactions across multiple trophic levels. Specifically, we explored the effects of temperature on two different tri-trophic interactions between black cherry and: (1) mutualistic leaf domatia-dwelling mites and leaf fungi; and (2) arthropod predators and herbivores. We present two datasets: one contains data on mites (count), leaf fungi (count of hyphae along a transect), leaf domatia (domatia size in milimeters), and extrafloral nectaries (count), collected at the end of the experiment from a subset of 3 leaves per plant. The next contains data on herbivory (proportion of leaves with evidence of herbivory on each plant), predator abundance (count of predators seen each week), and plant size (height), collected weekly over the 10 week experiment. We also present the code used to process and analyze these datasets, with the results presented in our main manuscript "Temperature-dependent shifts in multiple tri-trophic defense interactions on black cherry."