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Abstract Plants must respond to changing climatic conditions while continuing to defend against herbivores. While numerous studies have investigated how one type of stress affects plants, the effects of multiple abiotic and biotic stressors and their interactions are less understood. We used the Rainfall Exclusion eXperiment (REX) at the Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research site (KBS LTER) to quantify the individual and interactive effects of drought and warming treatments (abiotic stressors), and galling byRhopalomyia solidaginis(biotic stress) on tall goldenrod (Solidago altissima), a common native plant species in Michigan, USA. At the end of the 2021 and 2022 growing seasons, we measured stem height and biomass as a proxy for plant productivity, and seed mass per stem as a proxy for reproductive fitness. We also measured gall biomass, larval chamber number, and larval chamber volume to reflect the effects of drought and warming on the gallmaker. We found that warming mitigated some negative galling effects; galled plants were 7.1 cm shorter than non-galled plants in ambient conditions, but under warming, there was no reduction in height for galled plants. Furthermore, drought exacerbated some galling effects: galled plants experiencing drought conditions had the lowest probability of producing seeds (0.47) compared to plants from all other treatments. Understanding how plants respond to individual abiotic and biotic stressors as well as their interactions will enhance our ability to predict plant fitness and community dynamics under new climate regimes. 

Abstract Anthropogenic climate warming affects plant communities by changing community structure and function. Studies on climate warming have primarily focused on individual effects of warming, but the interactive effects of warming with biotic factors could be at least as important in community responses to climate change. In addition, climate change experiments spanning multiple years are necessary to capture interannual variability and detect the influence of these effects within ecological communities. Our study explores the individual and interactive effects of warming and insect herbivory on plant traits and community responses within a 7‐year warming and herbivory manipulation experiment in two early successional plant communities in Michigan, USA. We find stronger support for the individual effects of both warming and herbivory on multiple plant morphological and phenological traits; only the timing of plant green‐up and seed set demonstrated an interactive effect between warming and herbivory. With herbivory, warming advanced green‐up, but with reduced herbivory, there was no significant effect of warming. In contrast, warming increased plant biomass, but the effect of warming on biomass did not depend upon the level of insect herbivores. We found that these treatments had stronger effects in some years than others, highlighting the need for multiyear experiments. This study demonstrates that warming and herbivory can have strong direct effects on plant communities, but that their interactive effects are limited in these early successional systems. Because the strength and direction of these effects can vary by ecological context, it is still advisable to include levels of biotic interactions, multiple traits and years, and community type when studying climate change effects on plants and their communities.