ArticleAnnals of botany2026
Specific leaf area modulates but does not explain the association between abiotic stress tolerance and insect feeding guild prevalence in Northern Hemisphere woody plants.
Article in Annals of botany, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
aimsPlant adaptations to abiotic stress and insect herbivory may share functional bases, yet large-scale evidence linking stress tolerance strategies to herbivory patterns remains limited. We tested whether abiotic stress tolerance is associated with insect herbivory patterns in Northern Hemisphere woody plants, and whether specific leaf area (SLA) and plant functional type (PFT) modulate this relationship.
methodsWe combined data on 5927 lepidopteran and hymenopteran species with 645 woody plant species from three PFTs (deciduous angiosperms, evergreen angiosperms, evergreen gymnosperms) for which information on their shade, drought, cold and waterlogging tolerance was also available. We then modelled the prevalence of three feeding guilds (chewers, borers, miners) as a function of stress tolerance, SLA, and their interaction at both species and assemblage levels. KEY
resultsAssemblage-level associations were substantially stronger than species-level patterns (54 % vs. 18 % of significant effects, respectively). Despite significant SLA × stress tolerance interactions, these did not provide a clear mechanistic explanation of the observed patterns. In addition, spatial autocorrelation in model residuals was substantial (mean Moran's I = 0.66), and most of the observed effects were not robust to correction for spatial dependency.
conclusionsAbiotic stress tolerance and SLA interact to shape herbivore guild composition, but SLA modulates rather than mediates this relationship, defining a context within which other, unidentified factors (e.g. most specific defence traits) operate. The strong spatial structure in herbivore communities probably reflects biogeographical processes (dispersal limitation, host specificity, regional species pool assembly) that operate independently of contemporary trait distributions. Understanding plant-herbivore interactions at macroecological scales requires integrating trait-based filtering with historical and biogeographical constraints.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.