Shelter building caterpillars act as ecosystem engineers by creating and maintaining leaf shelters, which are then colonized by other arthropods. Foliage quality has been shown to influence initial colonization by shelter-building caterpillars. However, the effects of plant quality on the interactions between ecosystem engineers and their communities have yet to be studied at the whole plant level. We examined how leaf tying caterpillars, as ecosystem engineers, impact arthropod communities on
This content will become publicly available on May 8, 2024
- Award ID(s):
- 2017877
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10421184
- Editor(s):
- Ahmed, Ferdous
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PLOS Climate
- Volume:
- 2
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 2767-3200
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- e0000137
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Location Great Basin ecoregion, western North America.
Taxon Rodents and shrews.
Methods The elevational distributions of 34 species were determined from comprehensive field surveys conducted in three arid, temperate mountain ranges. Elevation–diversity relationships and community assembly processes were inferred from phylogenetic (PD) and functional diversity (FD) patterns of mean pairwise and mean nearest‐neighbor distances while accounting for differences in species richness. FD indices were calculated separately for traits related to either abiotic filtering (β‐niche traits) or biotic interactions (α‐niche traits) to test explicit predictions of the role of each across elevation.
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