Meeting Abstract
Understanding local diversity, turnover and variation in community response to environmental variability across scales are key goals in community ecology. I examine insect community composition and diversity across community succession using a space for time chronosequence. I test the relationship between taxonomic and functional turnover across the chronosequence, and drivers of insect community response to age related host polymorphism. I sampled arboreal arthropod communities on the Hawaiian Islands, where substrate ages range from historic to Pleistocene. Native Hawaiian mesic forests are dominated by the polymorphic tree species Metrosideros polymorpha, allowing comparison of arboreal phytophagous insect communities on the same host across age and community development. I use novel model-based methods for multivariate abundance data to analyze community composition and identify traits that drive species variation in environmental response. Results indicate that species richness and abundance peaks at intermediate age high productivity plots. Species turnover between trees on similar substrate ages was lowest at intermediate aged substrates, indicating that these forests may be dominated by a small number of species. Functional diversity increases with species richness but does not saturate within Hawaii. Insect traits predicting abundance in response to host polymorphism across the chronosequence are nymphal location, and feeding guild. Insect traits are strongly correlated with foliar nitrogen and specific leaf area.. These results shed light on the structure of phytophagous insect communities across substrate age and the role of host plant polymorphism for these insects on the Hawaiian islands.
