Insects on Plants: Diversity of Herbivore Assemblages Revisited

The diversity and composition of herbivore assemblages was a favored theme for community ecology in the 1970s and culminated in 1984 with Insects on Plants by Strong, Lawton and Southwood. We scrutinize findings since then, considering analyses of country-wide insect-host catalogs, field studies of local herbivore communities, and comparative studies at different spatial scales. Studies in tropical forests have advanced significantly and offer new insights into stratification and host specialization of herbivores. Comparative and long-term data sets are still scarce, which limits assessment of general patterns in herbivore richness and assemblage structure. Methods of community phylogenetic analysis, complex networks, spatial and among-host diversity partitioning, and metacommunity models represent promising approaches for future work.