What is it about?
Nitrogen is a limiting nutrient for growth of mangrove trees in Australia and New Zealand. We showed that climate and increased nitrogen had an interactive effect on consumption of mangrove leaves by herbivores and diversity of herbivores that varied by latitude but was not the same for all groups of herbivores.
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Why is it important?
Both global warming and eutrophication are major threats to coastal wetlands. We used large scale experiments to determine how these stresses impact both plants and animals in temperate and tropical mangrove ecosystems. We tested the hypothesis that biological interactions in the tropics have stronger responses to increased nutrients than in temperate ecosystems.
Perspectives
I hope this article makes people more aware of the diversity associated with mangroves. These ecosystems are often characterized by a low diversity of tree species. It has been wrongly assumed that the diversity of the associated fauna is also low. Instead, this study and others that we've done provide evidence that the fauna in the mangrove canopy is characterized by a diverse community of specialized species that feed cryptically inside leaf tissue. Because of the cryptic nature of these tiny insects, many if not most of them are still undescribed.
Ilka Feller
Smithsonian Institution
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Interactive effects of climate and nutrient enrichment on patterns of herbivory by different feeding guilds in mangrove forests, Global Ecology and Biogeography, September 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/geb.12644.
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