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Herbivory is ubiquitous. Despite being a potential driver of plant distribution and performance, herbivory remains largely undocumented. Some early attempts have been made to review, globally, how much leaf area is removed through insect feeding. Kozlov et al., in one of the most comprehensive reviews regarding global patterns of herbivory, have compiled published studies regarding foliar removal and sampled data on global herbivory levels using a standardized protocol. However, in the review by Kozlov et al., only 15 sampling sites, comprising 33 plant species, were evaluated in tropical areas around the globe. In Brazil, which ranks first in terms of plant biodiversity, with a total of 46,097 species, almost half (43%) being endemic, a single data point was sampled, covering only two plant species. In an attempt to increase knowledge regarding herbivory in tropical plant species and to provide the raw data needed to test general hypotheses related to plant-herbivore interactions across large spatial scales, we proposed a joint, collaborative network to evaluate tropical herbivory. This network allowed us to update and expand the data on insect herbivory in tropical and temperate plant species. Our data set, collected with a standardized protocol, covers 45 sampling sites from nine countries and includes leaf herbivory measurements of 57,239 leaves from 209 species of vascular plants belonging to 65 families from tropical and temperate regions. They expand previous data sets by including a total of 32 sampling sites from tropical areas around the globe, comprising 152 species, 146 of them being sampled in Brazil. For temperate areas, it includes 13 sampling sites, comprising 59 species. Thus, when compared to the most recent comprehensive review of insect herbivory (Kozlov et al.), our data set has increased the base of available data for the tropical plants more than 460% (from 33 to 152 species) and the Brazilian sampling was increased 7,300% (from 2 to 146 species). Data on precise levels of herbivory are presented for more than 57,000 leaves worldwide. There are no copyright restrictions. Please cite this paper when using the current data in publications; the authors request to be informed how the data is used in the publications.
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A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.
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Although many studies have shown that species richness decreases from low to high latitudes (the Latitudinal Diversity Gradient), little is known about the relationship between latitude and phylogenetic diversity. Here we examine global latitudinal patterns of phylogenetic diversity using a dataset of 459 woody and 589 herbaceous plant communities. We analysed the relationships between community phylogenetic diversity, latitude, biogeographic realm and vegetation type. Using the most recent global megaphylogeny for seed plants and the standardised effect sizes of the phylogenetic diversity metrics 'mean pairwise distance' (SESmpd) and 'mean nearest taxon distance' (SESmntd), we found that species were more closely-related at low latitudes in woody communities. In herbaceous communities, species were more closely-related at high latitudes than at intermediate latitudes, and the strength of this effect depended on biogeographic realm and vegetation type. Possible causes of this difference are contrasting patterns of speciation and dispersal. Most woody lineages evolved in the tropics, with many gymnosperms but few angiosperms adapting to high latitudes. In contrast, the recent evolution of herbaceous lineages such as grasses in young habitat types may drive coexistence of closely-related species at high latitudes. Our results show that high species richness commonly observed at low latitudes is not associated with high phylogenetic diversity.
