Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Departments of Botany, Forest, and Conservation Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z4.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2018 Nov 19;374(1763):20170393. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0393.
Mounting evidence shows that species interactions may mediate how individual species respond to climate change. However, long-term anthropogenic effects on species interactions are poorly characterized owing to a lack of data. Insect herbivory is a major ecological process that represents the interaction between insect herbivores and their host plants, but historical data on insect damage to plants is particularly sparse. Here, we suggest that museum collections of insects and plants can fill key gaps in our knowledge on changing trophic interactions, including proximate mechanisms and the net outcomes of multiple global change drivers across diverse insect herbivore-plant associations. We outline theory on how global change may affect herbivores and their host plants and highlight the unique data that could be extracted from museum specimens to explore their shifting interactions. We aim to provide a framework for using museum specimens to explore how some of the most diverse co-evolved relationships are responding to climate and land use change.This article is part of the theme issue 'Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene'.
越来越多的证据表明，物种相互作用可能会影响单个物种对气候变化的反应。然而，由于缺乏数据，长期的人为因素对物种相互作用的影响还没有得到很好的描述。昆虫食草是一个主要的生态过程，代表了昆虫食草动物与其宿主植物之间的相互作用，但有关植物受昆虫损害的历史数据特别稀少。在这里，我们建议博物馆收藏的昆虫和植物可以填补我们在不断变化的营养相互作用方面的知识空白，包括多个全球变化驱动因素对多种昆虫-植物食草动物关系的直接机制和净结果。我们概述了全球变化可能如何影响食草动物及其宿主植物的理论，并强调了可以从博物馆标本中提取出的独特数据，以探索它们不断变化的相互作用。我们的目标是提供一个利用博物馆标本探索一些最具多样性的共同进化关系如何应对气候和土地利用变化的框架。本文是“人类世生物多样性研究的生物标本”主题特刊的一部分。
