About this Research Topic

Background

An ecosystem is a community of organisms living together in an environment in which they interact, and where living beings interact with each other. If in ecological studies every type of parameter can be measured, in paleontology, the analysis and understanding of past ecosystems stop at the characterization of species and the indirect interpretation of their interaction with the environment.

Direct interactions between organisms are completely concealed. Since the early twentieth century, the innovative field of ancient plant-insect interaction has flourished and has been gathered around a common guide for identifying the plant-insect association that can be directly observed in plant tissues. With numerous palaeobotanical collections stored in museums around the world, the discipline has accumulated a large amount of data but has been restricted to discussions stuck in deep-time.

On the contrary, while real-time ecological studies have long had access to a wide variety of data supported by accurate measurements, their conclusions mostly ignore the deep-time dynamics. Nowadays this discipline throughout time faces interesting asymmetries, even paradoxes, in its own conclusions because of their respective boundaries.

Questions remain: Are the interpretations studied in paleoecology sufficient to explain patterns observed in real-time and vice-versa? Can ecology afford to ignore deep-time changes, and vice-versa?

The purpose of this special volume is to gather paleo and present-day studies on the plant-insect interaction discipline. The benefits are manifold:

1. It provides a common overview of plant-insect interactions topic across a timescale

2. Crossing publications through the deep-time, Q-time, and present could strengthen some assumptions and enlarge world-views

3. It will also question some theories and would raise new interrogations thanks to this enlarged worldview.

4. Promote transversal research between deep-time and real-time researchers on plant-insect associations and enhance new collaboration to improve knowledge on this significant topic which has become one of the major topics in the global change context.

Furthermore, we hope to motivate researchers in the writing of their pluridisciplinary ideas which until now had remained at the stage of the concept - a result of the lack of scientific journals being able to accommodate a manuscript of this kind.

The Editor's team has been built around these motivations, which means that no matter what the timescale of the manuscript submitted, at least one editor will be able to assess this relevance and efficiently find the right reviewers.

To guarantee the success of this Research Topic, we encourage the submissions of ecological manuscripts on plant-insect associations from all horizons. The latest findings in the past and present are covered in this Research Topic, as well as a synthesis of results and meta-analyses on their own timescales.

The aims and scope are (but are not limited to):

- Morphological evidence related to the plant-arthropod association: herbivory, reproduction, pollination.

- Plant-insect interactions on fossil plant tissues

- Modern study cases of plant hosts and their natural insect associated (herbivore, pollinator)

- Plant defense strategies

- Meta-analyses of available data from the current literature

- Methodological approach to measure plant-insect interaction from the different timescale

Keywords: plant-insect association, herbivory, pollination, ecosystem dynamic, paleoecology, trophic structure

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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