page_title: Plant ecology
section_title: Herbivory
hierarchical_section_title: Plant ecology / Biological interactions / Herbivory
caption_attribution_description: English: Reindeers in front of two experimental grazing exclosures in Abisko, sub-Arctic Sweden. The closest fence excludes large herbivores while the furthest one excludes rodents as well.
context_page_description: Plant ecology is a subdiscipline of ecology which studies the distribution and abundance of plants, the effects of environmental factors upon the abundance of plants, and the interactions among and between plants and other organisms. Examples of these are the distribution of temperate deciduous forests in North America, the effects of drought or flooding upon plant survival, and competition among desert plants for water, or effects of herds of grazing animals upon the composition of grasslands.
  A global overview of the Earth's major vegetation types is provided by O.W. Archibold. He recognizes 11 major vegetation types: tropical forests, tropical savannas, arid regions, Mediterranean ecosystems, temperate forest ecosystems, temperate grasslands, coniferous forests, tundra, terrestrial wetlands, freshwater ecosystems and coastal/marine systems. This breadth of topics shows the complexity of plant ecology, since it includes plants from floating single-celled algae up to large canopy forming trees.
  One feature that defines plants is photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the process of a chemical reactions to create glucose and oxygen, which is vital for plant life.
context_section_description: An important ecological function of plants is that they produce organic compounds for herbivores in the bottom of the food web. A large number of plant traits, from thorns to chemical defenses, can be related to the intensity of herbivory. Large herbivores can also have many effects on vegetation. These include removing selected species, creating gaps for regeneration of new individuals, recycling nutrients, and dispersing seeds.  Certain ecosystem types, such as grasslands, may be dominated by the effects of large herbivores, although fire is also an equally important factor in this biome.  In few cases, herbivores are capable of nearly removing all the vegetation at a site (for example, geese in the Hudson Bay Lowlands of Canada, and nutria in the marshes of Louisiana) but normally herbivores have a more selective impact, particularly when large predators control the abundance of herbivores. The usual method of studying the effects of herbivores is to build exclosures, where they cannot feed, and compare the plant communities in the exclosures to those outside over many years. Often such long term experiments show that herbivores have a significant effect upon the species that make up the plant community.
caption: Reindeer in front of herbivore exclosures. Excluding different herbivores (here reindeer, or reindeer and rodents) has different effects on the vegetation.
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