DOI: 10.5061/dryad.47200
title: Data from: Plant diversity enhances moth diversity in an intensive forest management experiment

description: Intensive forest management (IFM) promises to help satisfy increasing
 global demand for wood, but may come at the cost of local reductions to
 forest biodiversity. IFM often reduces early seral plant diversity as a
 result of efforts to eliminate plant competition with crop trees. If
 diversity is a function of bottom-up drivers, theory predicts that
 specialists at lower trophic levels (e.g., insect herbivores) should be
 particularly sensitive to reductions in plant diversity. We conducted a
 stand-level experiment to test bottom-up controls on moth community
 structure, as mediated by degrees of forest management intensity. Using a
 dataset of 12,003 moths representing 316 moth species, moth richness
 decreased only slightly, if at all, as herbicide intensity increased (P =
 0.062); the ’moderate’ treatment, which is most commonly applied in the
 northwestern USA, was estimated to have 4.72 (± 2.14 SE, P =0.039) fewer
 species than the control. Structural equation modeling revealed strong
 support for an effect of herbicide on plant abundance, which influenced
 plant species richness and subsequently moth species richness. Moth
 species richness was associated with plant species richness and followed a
 power law function (z=0.42, P =0.006), which is surprisingly consistent
 with a recent large-scale experiment in agricultural systems, and provides
 support for bottom-up drivers of moth community structure. Moth abundance
 was not influenced by the direct effects of silvicultural herbicide
 treatments. Site-level effects and variation in pre-harvest vegetation
 communities resulted in residual broadleaf and herbaceous vegetation in
 even the most intensive treatment. Even at low densities, these residual
 deciduous and herbaceous plants supported higher-than-expected moth
 abundance and richness. We conclude that forest management practices that
 retain early seral vegetation diversity are the most likely to conserve
 moth communities.
description: Metadata and Data for
 Root et al. Ecological ApplicationsRoot et al. 2016
 Ecological Applications Metadata 6 tables are associated with this study
 MothCommunities2012.csv and MothCommunities2013.csv include moth community
 data. Preliminary column names are self-evident and include the units.
 “richness” is the species richness of moths sampled, and the “totabund” is
 the total abundance of moths sampled. Following columns are for each moth
 species headed by their scientific names, and numbers represent the count
 sampled. MothSpeciesTraits.csv includes the characteristics of the moths.
 The first column, “Sci” is the scientific name of the moth with
 genus.species. “family” includes the family names, and “FamShort” is the
 abbreviated family name. “specialist” refers to whether the species
 specializes on one family of plants or many families of plants (then
 considered a “generalist”). “FineFeed” includes the family of plants for
 specialist feeders. “CoarseFeed” is the coarse feeding group and includes
 hardwoods, herbs, grasses, conifers, lichens and ferns. “Total” is the
 total abundance of that species in the dataset. “Control”, “light”,
 “moderate”, and “intensive” are the abundances in each treatment.
 PlantCommunity.csv includes the plant community data. “standyear” includes
 the name of the stand with a “.” separating it from the sampling year.
 Acronyms for each plant species are the headers for all other columns.
 Numbers represent the average cover in quadrats in each stand by year
 combination. PlantCategories.csv includes the category of plants used for
 analysis. The “Plants” column has the acronyms used in
 “PlantCommunity.csv”. The “Group” has the category for each plant,
 including Coni (conifer), Hdwd (hardwood), Fern, Forbes (herbaceous
 non-graminoids), and grass (graminoids). StandCovariates.csv has the
 characteristics of the stands. Column names should be self-evident and
 include corrdinates, elevation, area, aspect, slope, and
 blocks.Ecol
 Apps data to archive.zip