2026-10-13T22:11:12Z https://www.scidb.cn/oai

10.57760/sciencedb.10798 2023-09-04T09:48:56Z

2023-09-04 Phytochemical diversity impacts herbivory in a tropical rainforest tree community doi:10.57760/sciencedb.10798 en Metabolomics provides an unprecedented window into diverse plant secondary metabolites that represent a potentially critical niche dimension in tropical forests underlying species co-existence. Here, we used untargeted metabolomics to evaluate chemical composition of 358 tree species and its relationship with phylogeny and variation in light environment, soil nutrients, and insect-herbivore leaf damage in a tropical rain forest plot. We report no phylogenetic signal in most compound classes, indicating rapid diversification in tree metabolomes. We found that locally co-occurring species were more chemically dissimilar than random, and that local chemical dispersion and metabolite diversity was associated with lower herbivory, especially that of specialist insect herbivores. Our results highlight the role of secondary metabolites in mediating plant-herbivore interactions and their potential to facilitate niche differentiation in a manner that contributes to species coexistence. Furthermore, our findings suggest that specialist herbivore pressure is an important mechanism promoting phytochemical diversity in tropical forests. Species diversity; Plant secondary metabolites; Herbivore pressure; Generalist herbivory; Specialist herbivory; Tropical forest Wang xuezhao Yunyun He Brian E. Sedio Lu Jin Xuejun Ge Suphanee Glomglieng Min Cao Jianhong Yang Nathan G. Swenson Jie Yang PUBLIC https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ dataset http://www.doi.org/10.1111/ele.14308 Science Data Bank