Insects and non-woody plants slow down tropical forest succession: a community-wide experiment in Papua New Guinea

Ecological succession is a complex community-wide process whose theoretical principles require further development. Here, we test the hypothesis that the succession of woody plants in tropical rainforests is determined by bottom-up plant competition, rendering top-down control by insect herbivores insignificant. Over 18 months of rainforest secondary succession, we removed insects and non-woody plants from replicate 5×5 m plots in a factorial experiment at 700 and 1700 m elevation in New Guinea. At 700 m elevation, insect removal increased biomass, reduced diversity, and altered the species composition of woody plants, while removal of non-woody plants increased both biomass and diversity of woody plants and altered their species composition. At 1700 m, the effect of insects on woody plant biomass and species composition disappeared while the effect of non-woody plants on woody plant biomass, diversity and species composition became stronger. The removal of insects did not increase the ..., , Metadata for the MS Analyses This is the dataset and R codes for the MS titled: \"Insects and non-woody plants slow down tropical forest succession: a community-wide experiment in Papua New Guinea\". Kari Sogera Iamba, Piotr Szefer, Kenneth Molem, Austin Sau, Gibson Maiah, Vojtech Novotny (A) Datasets Two datasets are presented in two Excel files, used for all the analyses: \[1] Plant data from the experimental plots in Combine_Sites_Biomass_2023.xlsx used for all analyses in the main MS and also for the Fig. S1 in the Supporting Information. Each row in the table represents a record of a particular plant species in a particular experimental plot, with information on growth form and the amount of plant biomass. Definition of columns: (A) Elevation: elevation of the study site, 700 or 1700 m asl. (B) Blocks: nine blocks of four experimental plots per elevation, B1 – B9 for 700 m asl, B10 - B18 for 1700 m asl, each of them in a 0.2 ha forest clearing. These unique blocks allows for dir..., ,