Wild herbivores and livestock share the majority of rangelands worldwide, yet few controlled experiments have addressed their individual, additive, and interactive impacts on ecosystem function. While ungulate herbivores generally reduce standing biomass, their effects on aboveground net primary production (ANPP) can vary by spatial and temporal context, intensity of herbivory, and herbivore id...

Digestive physiology has played a prominent role in explanations for terrestrial herbivore body size evolution and size-driven diversification and niche differentiation. This is based on the association of increasing body mass (BM) with diets of lower quality, and with putative mechanisms by which a higher BM could translate into a higher digestive efficiency. Such concepts, however, often do n...

Large herbivore livestock and wildlife in Mongolia depend almost entirely for substance on forage standing crop produced each year on natural pastureland. Consequently, both livestock and wildlife are continuously subject to environmental risk, especially drought and severe winter storms, while livestock are also subject to financial risk. As consumption-based livestock production changes to co...

Herbivores are important drivers of plant species coexistence and community assembly. However, detailed mechanistic information on how herbivores affect dominance hierarchies between plant species is scarce. Here, we used data of a multi-site herbivore exclusion experiment in grasslands to assess changes in the cover of 28 plant species in response to aboveground pesticide. application. Moreove...

Plants release volatiles in response to caterpillar feeding that attract natural enemies of the herbivores, a tri-trophic interaction which has been considered an indirect plant defence against herbivores. The caterpillar-induced plant volatiles have been reported to repel or attract conspecific adult herbivores. To date however, no volatile signals that either repel or attract conspecific adul...

In the agroecosystem, genetically engineered plants producing insecticidal Cry proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) interact with non-target herbivores and other elements of the food web. Stacked Bt crops expose herbivores to multiple Cry proteins simultaneously. In this study, the direct interactions between SmartStax® Bt maize producing six different Cry proteins and two herbivores with ...

The planting of transgenic crops expressing Bacillus thuringiensis endotoxins is widespread throughout the world; the prolific increase in their application exposes nontarget organisms to toxins designed to control pests. To date, studies have focused upon the effects of Bt endotoxins on specific herbivores and detritivores, without consideration of their persistence within arthropod food webs....

Herbivory is a key process on coral reefs that can facilitate reef-building corals by excluding algae that otherwise negatively impact coral settlement, growth, and survivorship. Over the last several de cades, coral cover on Caribbean reefs has declined precipitously. On many reefs, large structurally complex corals have been replaced by algae and other non-reef-building organisms, resulting i...

Theoretical models of tree–grass coexistence in savannas have focused primarily on the role of resource availability and fire. It is clear that herbivores heavily impact vegetation structure in many savannas, but their role in driving tree–grass coexistence and the stability of the savanna state has received less attention. Theoretical models of tree–grass dynamics tend to treat herbivory as a ...

Herbivore populations are influenced by a combination of food availability and predator pressure, the relative contribution of which is hypothesized to vary across a productivity gradient. In tropical forests, treefall gaps are pockets of high productivity in the otherwise less productive forest understory. Thus, we hypothesize that higher light availability in gaps will increase plant resource...