Seasonality affects specialisation of a temperate forest herbivore community

Understanding spatiotemporal trends on insect-plant interaction networks is essential to unveil the ecological and evolutionary processes driving herbivore specialisation. However, community studies accounting for temporal dynamics in host-plant specialisation of herbivorous insects are surprisingly scarce.

Here, we provide the background data which were used to investigate how seasonality affects specialisation of a temperate forest herbivore community.  This dataset results from a comprehensive sampling of more than 4,700 folivorous caterpillars associated with 16 deciduous tree species in eastern North America. Specifically, we provide three abundance-based plant-caterpillar interaction matrices. Each interaction matrix represents a six-week period of the growing season. These time periods are defined as follow: early season, midseason, and late season.

We observed a significantly less specialised herbivore fauna in the early season than in the two subsequent summer seasons. We further found that the seasonal increase in specialisation was driven by a remarkable turnover in species composition rather than by shifts in guild structure or intraspecific changes in diet breadth of the herbivores.