Herbivores: Between Plants and Predators

About this book

Examining herbivory as a central theme can bring together expertise from different disciplines, such as plant chemistry, nutrient cycling, food webs, vegetation succession, animal foraging strategies, community structure and population dynamics. This volume takes such an approach - providing an up-to-date overview of current knowledge on all aspects of herbivory in terrestrial ecosystems, and signalling areas of possible new collaborative research for the future.

Contents

What we know and do not know about coevolution: insect herbivores and plants as a test case The ecology and evolution of host plant range: butterflies as a model group Genetic variation in cytochrome P450-based resistance to plant allelochemicals and insecticides To leave or to stay, that is the question: predictions from models of patch-leaving strategies The evolution of direct and indirect plant defence against herbivorous arthropods Herbivore diversity and plant dynamics: compensatory and additive effects Insect and nematode herbivory below-ground: interactions and role in vegetation succession Competition for light, plant species replacement and herbivore abundance along productivity gradients Cyclic grazing in vertebrates and the manipulation of the food resource Herbivores, nutrients and trophic cascades in terrestrial environments Digestive and ingestive adaptations of mammalian herbivores to low quality forage Functional responses to resource complexity: an experimental analysis of foraging by beavers Scaling-up from functional response to numerical response in vertebrate herbivores Physiological flexibility and its impact on energy metabolism and foraging behaviour in birds Community dynamics of vertebrate herbivores - how can we untangle the web? Plant-carnivore interactions: evolutionary and ecological consequences for plant, herbivore and carnivore Dynamics of consumer-resource interactions: importance of individual attributes Individual-based modelling as an integrative approach in theoretical and applied population dynamics and food web studies Predator control in terrestrial ecosystems: the underground food chain of bush lupine

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