Abstract
Plants growing in vegetationally diverse habitats or near taxonomically distinct neighbors often experience less herbivory than plants in more simple habitats. When plants experience more herbivory in these situations it is called associational susceptibility and is most common when herbivores spill from their preferred plant host onto neighboring plants. Cankerworms are common pests of urban trees that have been shown in forests to disperse from preferred to less preferred hosts. I found that two common characteristics of urban habitats, low vegetational diversity and exotic plants, affect cankerworm herbivory of non-host understory plants. In an urban landscape I measured cankerworm herbivory on native dogwood trees growing in the open and below cankerworm host and non-host trees. Herbivory of native dogwoods was ten times greater below cankerworm hosts than on trees below non-hosts or in the open. At an arboretum I measured herbivory of native and exotic plants growing below cankerworm hosts in simple landscape plantings and in natural forests. Associational susceptibility of native dogwoods and Rhododendron spp. disappeared when they were growing in complex natural forests even though cankerworm hosts were more abundant. Cankerworms consistently preferred native plant species more than exotic congeners in laboratory experiments. As such, exotic plants experienced very little herbivory regardless of habitat. Herbivorous pests are often more abundant on urban plants than plants in natural habitats. My research shows that, although some plants experience more herbivory when growing near cankerworm hosts, increasing urban habitat complexity could reduce pest damage overall.
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Acknowledgments
I first observed cankerworm herbivory patterns at Bartlett Tree Laboratories and Arboretum during the Southern Plant Network Southern Regional Workshop. I am grateful to Casey Sclar, Amanda Hodges, and the Bartlett staff for this opportunity and apologize for sneaking out of the workshop. Greg Bryant and Bobby Chanthammavong helped collect data on campus. Sarah Jandricic, Elsa Youngsteadt, Emily Meineke, Adam Dale, Holden Appler, and Travis McClure, and two anonymous reviewers provided comments to improve the manuscript. This work was supported by a grant from the USDA AFRI (2013-02476) to SDF, and by the NCSU Department of Entomology and the Keck Center for Behavioral Biology. The project described in this publication was supported by Cooperative Agreement No. G11AC20471 and G13AC00405 from the United States Geological Survey. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Southeast Climate Science Center or the USGS. This manuscript is submitted for publication with the understanding that the United States Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes. SDF was also supported by NSF RAPID (1318655) and USDA Southern Region IPM (2010-02678).
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Frank, S.D. Bad neighbors: urban habitats increase cankerworm damage to non-host understory plants. Urban Ecosyst 17, 1135–1145 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-014-0368-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-014-0368-x