Non‐native plants reduce abundance, richness, and host specialization in lepidopteran communities

By K. Burghardt, D. Tallamy, C. Philips, Kimberley J. Shropshire. 2010

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The impact of non-native plant invasions on ecosystems has been controversial because obvious local effects have not yet led to the global extinction of any native plant species on continents and large islands. We suggest that extinction is not the appropriate measure of impact on ecosystem function and present evidence that non-native plant invasions or the replacement of native plants with non-native ornamentals results in significant bottom-up reductions of energy available for local food webs. Using replicated common gardens we compared Lepidoptera species richness and abundance on native plants, non-native congeners of those natives, and non-native species with no close relatives in the study area. Non-native plants supported significantly fewer caterpillars of significantly fewer specialist and generalist species even when the non-natives were close relatives of native host plants. However, the effect size was smaller in the latter category indicating phylogenetic similarity to local natives may pos...

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/15398cbc34df30c1da76e685ae3a168b1ad2d41a

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Citations in the corpus

The decline of moths in Great Britain: a review of possible causes (2013, background): “Experiments in the United States found that non-native woody plants supported significantly lower abundance and species richness of moth and butterfly larvae than native trees and shrubs, even if the alien plants were in the same genus as the native hostplants (Burghardt et al., 2010).”
The imbalance of nature: revisiting a Darwinian framework for invasion biology (2014, background): “Some of these ecosystem changes may prove detrimental to native species (Burghardt et al., 2010), raising additional hurdles for conservation.”
Native plants improve breeding and foraging habitat for an insectivorous bird (2017, methodology): “To determine the caterpillar abundance on individual woody plant species, we conducted a timed-search sampling effort, designed for detection of Lepidoptera on woody plants, within a subset of yards where chickadees were present (Wagner, 2010; Burghardt et al., 2010).”
Insect Declines in the Anthropocene. (2020, background): “…invasive and ornamental plants pose a combined and growing threat, especially in areas or systems of high human occupation and disturbance; exotic plants can diminish insect herbivore loads by more than 90%, which, in turn, negatively affects birds and other insectivores (18, 124, 125, 151, 158).”
Urbanization Shapes the Ecology and Evolution of Plant-Arthropod Herbivore Interactions (2019, background): “This can lead to an abundance of native generalist herbivores, whereas native specialist herbivorous arthropods are likely to experience population declines in urban areas due to a lack of their native host species (Burghardt et al., 2010).”