Introduced plants as novel Anthropocene habitats for insects

Insect-plant interactions from an extensive field experiment spanning several years (2010-2016), which examined the insects sampled from 69 garden plant species that vary in their relatedness to the native flora of Great Britain. The 69 plant species were organised into 23 species triplets, with a third of the plots containing a mixture of native plant species, a third containing a mixture of non-native species closely related to the natives (‘congeners’), and the remaining third of the plots containing a mixture of distantly or unrelated ‘exotic’ plant species from the southern Hemisphere. Pollinators were identified in situ, whereas frozen Vortis suction samples were identified in the laboratory. All insect taxa were identified to as close to species level as possible. For further information please see Padovani et al. (2019).