Plant-caterpillar interaction matrices of temperate broadleaf forests

1. Assemblages of insect herbivores are structured by plant traits such as nutrient content, secondary metabolites, physical traits, and phenology. Many of these traits are phylogenetically conserved, implying a decrease in trait similarity with increasing phylogenetic distance of the host plant taxa. Thus, a metric of phylogenetic distances and relationships can be considered a proxy for phylogenetically conserved plant traits and used to predict variation in herbivorous insect assemblages among co-occurring plant species.

2. Using a Holarctic dataset of exposed-feeding and shelter-building caterpillars, we aimed at showing how phylogenetic relationships among host plants explain compositional changes and characteristics of herbivore assemblages.

3. Our plant–caterpillar network data derived from plot-based samplings at three different continents included >28,000 individual caterpillar-plant interactions. We tested if increasing phylogenetic distance of the host plants leads t...