About this Research Topic

Background

Plants and their insect herbivores account for more than half of the macroscopic diversity on earth and their interactions have a profound impact on the ecology and evolution of ecosystems. The arms race between plants and herbivores has been invoked as one of the main drivers of trait diversification, coevolution, and even ecological coexistence at a community level. Current evidence suggests that plant and herbivore interactions vary across latitudinal, altitudinal, and environmental gradients, and even among individuals of the same species. Herbivore pressure is observed to be remarkably elevated encircling the equator, and because tropical forests are the ecosystems where the diversity of plants and herbivores is among the highest in the terrestrial world, the arms race may be particularly pronounced.

Plant-herbivore interactions are of particular interest for habitats of high species diversity and that are facing anthropogenically altered ecosystems as a consequence of climate change and forest fragmentation. For example, it is predicted that global warming will enhance the homogenization of tropical forest communities by the increasing abundance of generalist and highly competitive species, as well as changes in the landscape itself through destabilizing shifts in biotic and abiotic factors. Diversity of plant defense mechanisms has sparked debate concerning the cost and value of their presence, their relative effectiveness, and the genesis of the relative forces driving its evolution. The distribution of anti-herbivore defenses among species and plant tissues has both ecological and evolutionary implications on the population dynamics of herbivores and other pathogens, as well as for the survival success of individual plant species in different communities.

The objective of this Research Topic is to highlight the latest advances addressing the ecology and evolution of the interactions between tropical plants and their associated herbivores. This topic includes factors shaping host association, resistance traits (including chemical secondary metabolites machinery, physical and biotic), and variation across gradients and within individuals. In answering these questions, this Research Topic aims to summarize recent advances in the evolutionary ecology of tropical plant defenses, from their chemical profile (i.e. the secondary metabolites machinery) to the co-evolutionary paths that shape communities' competition or facilitation, success, and coexistence. We expect this Research Topic to fill knowledge gaps of how global change drivers and human-modified landscapes will impact the way plants take up nutrients and use acquire nutrients for growth or defense, particularly considering plant defense traits are evolutionarily labile.

We expect research contributions to be innovative, integrative, cutting edge, and well supported by experimental or observational, short or long-term, data that fits properly within the proposal subject. Although we are looking for studies in the Tropical Biome (from lowlands to upper mountains), comparisons or contrasts with habitats could be welcome after a thorough analysis by the topic editors. We encourage contributions across scales and from a diversity of approaches including studies from observational to experimental; from individuals to populations, communities or meta-communities (local to regional); insect-plant and above-belowground interactions; physiology/functional traits; biogeographic/phylogeographic; new technologies/modeling approaches.

Original research and review reports are welcomed on themes including but not limited to:
• the structural composition of biodiversity of plants damaging organisms;
• has the evolution of plant defenses been a consequence of phylogenetic relatedness, ecological similarity, or enemies pressure?;
• the role of secondary metabolites in the evolutionary ecology of forests and communities;
• insect-plant interactions (any types and levels);
• above- belowground interactions (e.g. the impact of nutrients limitation);
• use of high-resolution technologies such as NIR or LIDAR to reveal hidden patterns of plants damaging at the population, community, local or regional levels.

Keywords: herbivory, leaf traits, metabolomics, nutrients limitation, plant damage, phenology, physical traits, species interactions, strategies, trade-offs

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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