DOI: 10.5061/dryad.vg089
title: Data from: Deconstruction of a plant-arthropod community reveals influential plant traits with nonlinear effects on arthropod assemblages

description: 1. Studies of herbivores and secondary consumer communities rarely
 incorporate a comprehensive characterization of primary producer trait
 variation, thus limiting our understanding of how plants mediate community
 assembly of consumers. 2. We took advantage of recent technological
 developments for efficient generation of phytochemical, microbial, and
 genomic data to characterize individual alfalfa plants (Medicago sativa;
 Fabaceae) growing in an old-field, semi-naturalized state for 770 traits
 (including 753 chemical features). Using random forest modeling, we
 investigated the effect of variation in these traits on arthropod and
 fungal assemblages while accounting for plant genetic structure. 3. We
 found that traits indicative of plant vigor, including size, percentage of
 flowering stems, and leaf area, were positively associated with arthropod
 richness and abundance. Most phytochemicals were, by comparison, poor
 predictors, although phytochemical diversity and several individual
 phenolic compounds were important. Plants with a higher proportion of
 flowering stems were hotspots of inter-trophic interactions with higher
 species richness of secondary consumers. The effects of many traits on
 plant-associated assemblages were best modeled as nonlinear functions,
 often incorporating threshold effects. Foliar fungal richness was not well
 predicted by our models, suggesting we have much to learn regarding the
 role of plant traits on phyllosphere fungi at small spatial scales. 4. Our
 results support the need for characterization of multiple axes of plant
 phenotypes in studies of plant-arthropod-microbe communities, and
 demonstrate the value of modern analytical techniques for understanding
 the nonlinear ways in which plant traits mediate the structure of
 associated biotic communities.
description: Phenotypic data and
 indices of associated biotic communities for each focal
 plantSee readme file for
 description of each field.Phenotypic_and_community_data_by_plant.csvArthropod_counts_by_samplingevent_plantArthropod counts by taxon by sampling event. All fields self-explanatory, except "species_identifier", which refers to the unique numeric identifier given to a morphospeciesMass spec features not placed in a putative chemical classThe first field has focal plant information in the form "MesaJH.01" where 01 refers to the first plant. Values in the file are intensities. Data were combined into putative parent compounds using CAMERA (see methods) and normalized by sample mass.Unidentified_msFeatures_Camera.csvFile mapping morphospecies to putative ecological guildspeciesGuild.csvSaponin mass spec. features normalized by sample weightSaponins_normalized.csvPhenolic mass spec. features normalized by sample massphenolics_normalized.csvPlantLocationsLocations of plants in terms of bearing and meters from originWarcup taxonomic placement of each fungal OTUoutputrdpwarcup.csvOTU table for fungiNormalized to counts per million, see methodsnormalized_counts_by_sample_by_OTU.csvOTUs fasta fileOTUs.faGenetic dataIncludes files with various QC and summary information as well as the genotype estimate matrixFallonPopgen.tar.gz