Data and code from: Volatile organic compounds diversity mediates tree diversity-insect herbivory relationships

The effects of plant diversity on insect herbivory are inconsistent in the literature, highlighting the need for further mechanistic understanding. Plant volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are influenced by plant diversity and related to insect herbivory. However, the role of VOCs in mediating plant diversity effects on insect herbivory remains poorly explored. Here, we investigated chewing insect herbivory of 128,818 leaves from 2606 trees, measured leaf VOCs from 137 tree individuals, and assessed tree growth across a tree species richness gradient in a Biodiversity-Ecosystem Functioning experiment in southern China. We aimed to explore the mechanisms underlying tree diversity effects on insect herbivory by examining the roles of plant VOCs.
, Based on the VOC profiles of the 137 samples [VOC_abundance_data. csv; group_info. csv], variations in the composition and concentration of samples’ VOCs across different plant diversity levels were evaluated by the permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) and the principal coordinate analysis (PCoA). We first constructed a sample-VOC abundance matrix for all samples, where peak areas from chromatograms represented the abundance of each compound (Massad et al., 2017). Before analysis, we standardized the VOC abundance by dividing each emission by the row sum, converting the data to relative abundance. In the PERMANOVA, the standardized VOC matrix was considered as the response variable, while plant species richness and species identity as independent variables. The analysis was based on the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity and we set the number of permutations to 999. We used “vegan”  (Oksanen et al., 2022) and “ape” (Paradis & Schliep, 2019) packages to perform PER..., # Data and code from: Volatile organic compounds diversity mediates tree diversity-insect herbivory relationships

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.1g1jwsv8r](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1g1jwsv8r)

## Description of the data and file structure

### Files and variables

#### Files:

* LAR_and_RGR_data.csv
* species_distribution.csv
* VOC_01_data.csv
* VOC_abundance_data.csv
* VOC_SP_01_data.csv

**Description:** 

**LAR_and_RGR_data.csv: data for GLMM, LMM and SEM, including raw data**

* Label: Unique sample identifier in the study site
* Block: Block number (1-8)
* Plot: Plot number (1-40)
* BP: Block and Plot combination code
* SP: species
* SR: species richness (1,2,4,8)
* Compo: species composition of the plot
* LAR: insect herbivory (%)
* LARp: insect herbivory + 0.00001 (%)
* D_4: diameter in 2020 (mm)
* D_5: diameter in 2021 (mm)
* RGR_D: relative growth rate based on diameter
* raoQ_137: community VOC diversity (Rao's) based on VOC abundance
* raoQ_137_01: community VOC diversity ...,