Low host specificity of herbivorous insects in a tropical forest
- V. Novotný, Y. Basset, P. Drozd
- Environmental ScienceNature
- 25 April 2002
It is shown that most herbivorous species feed on several closely related plant species, suggesting that species-rich genera are dominant in tropical floras, and monophagous herbivores are probably rare in tropical forests.
Quantifying Uncertainty in Estimation of Tropical Arthropod Species Richness
- A. Hamilton, Y. Basset, J. Yen
- Environmental ScienceAmerican Naturalist
- 10 May 2010
Two models that account for parameter uncertainty by replacing point estimates with probability distributions are presented, suggesting that in spite of 250 years of taxonomy and around 855,000 species of arthropods already described, approximately 70% await description.
Rare species in communities of tropical insect herbivores: pondering the mystery of singletons
- V. Novotný, Y. Basset
- Environmental Science
- 1 June 2000
The host specificity, taxonomic composition and feeding guild of rare species were studied in communities of herbivorous insects in New Guinea, finding that a species was rare on a particular host whilst more common on other, often related, host species, or relatively rare on numerous other host plants, so that its aggregate population was high.
Vertical stratification of arthropod assemblages.
- Y. Basset, P. Hammond, R. Kitching
- Environmental Science
- 2003
Why Are There So Many Species of Herbivorous Insects in Tropical Rainforests?
- V. Novotný, P. Drozd, G. Weiblen
- Environmental ScienceScience
- 25 August 2006
Findings suggest that the latitudinal gradient in insect species richness could be a direct function of plant diversity, which increased sevenfold from the authors' temperate to tropical study sites.
Guild-specific patterns of species richness and host specialization in plant-herbivore food webs from a tropical forest.
- V. Novotný, S. Miller, G. Weiblen
- Environmental ScienceJournal of Animal Ecology
- 1 November 2010
A complex, species-rich plant-herbivore food web for lowland rain forest in Papua New Guinea is described, resolving 6818 feeding links between 224 plant species and 1490 herbivore species drawn from 11 distinct feeding guilds.
Insects on Plants: Diversity of Herbivore Assemblages Revisited
- T. Lewinsohn, V. Novotný, Y. Basset
- Environmental Science
- 10 November 2005
Methods of community phylogenetic analysis, complex networks, spatial and among-host diversity partitioning, and metacommunity models represent promising approaches for future work into stratification and host specialization of herbivores.
Arthropods of Tropical Forests: Spatio-Temporal Dynamics and Resource Use in the Canopy
- Y. Basset, V. Novotný, S. Miller, R. Kitching
- Environmental Science
- 11 December 2008
ARTHROPODS OF TROPICAL FORESTS: SPATIO-TEMPORAL DYNAMICS AND RESOURCE USE IN THE CANOPY Y. Basset, V. Novotny, S.E. Miller and R.L. Kitching, eds. 2003. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-52182000-6…
Arthropod Diversity in a Tropical Forest
- Y. Basset, L. Čížek, M. Leponce
- Environmental ScienceScience
- 14 December 2012
This work sampled the phylogenetic breadth of arthropod taxa from the soil to the forest canopy in the San Lorenzo forest, Panama using a comprehensive range of structured protocols and found that models based on plant diversity fitted the accumulated species richness of both herbivore and nonherbivore taxa exceptionally well.
The global distribution of diet breadth in insect herbivores
- M. Forister, V. Novotný, L. Dyer
- Environmental ScienceProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…
- 29 December 2014
A global dataset is used to investigate host range for over 7,500 insect herbivore species covering a wide taxonomic breadth and interacting with more than 2,000 species of plants in 165 families to ask whether relatively specialized and generalized herbivores represent a dichotomy rather than a continuum from few to many host families and species attacked and whether diet breadth changes with increasing plant species richness toward the tropics.
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